VT Synthetic Biology Group will be exhibiting at KTU on April 10th!

Seeing Inside Living Cells by Making Them Glow

VT Synthetic Biology Group

We know a lot about what goes on inside of cells, but it is very hard to see inside without killing the cells. Most of what we know comes from either trying different experiments and looking for big changes (like cells dying) or by killing the cells and then looking at the parts inside. What would be much better is to be able to look at all the parts inside while they are still alive and living their normal lives. One way to do this is to use fluorescent proteins, which glow different colors and can be seen under a microscope. What we do is modify the cells' DNA so that these fluorescent proteins are attached to other proteins that we want to study. Then we can put them under a microscope and make videos of what those proteins are doing.

The synthetic biology group at Virginia Tech is interested in working with DNA so that we can engineer organisms to do new and exciting things. For example, we are making bacteria that glow when there are dangerous chemicals present. These could be chemicals that terrorists want to use or things that are dangerous to the environment. In the future, synthetic biologists hope to create more and more complicated things: bacteria that find and kill cancer cells, organisms that produce biofuels and bioplastics, and more.