ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
Programmable bacteria detect and record an environmental signal in the mammalian gut.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 178 papers.
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Who cites it
178 citing papers in PubMed.
- Engineered bacterial therapeutics from synthetic biology to clinical translation: A multi-database scientometric analysis, 2000-2026.Human vaccines & immunotherapeutics · 2026Review
- An engineered bacterial symbiont maps micron-scale sugar gradients in the honeybee gut.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Engineering microbial consortia for distributed signal processing.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Engineering commensal microbes for host health.Cell host & microbe · 2026Review
- The Gut Microbiome Dependency Continuum in Drug Discovery: A Unified Pharmacology Framework Linking Clinical Drugs, Natural Products, and Engineered Microbial Therapeutics.Biotech (Basel (Switzerland)) · 2026Review
- Magnetic medical microrobots with memory-capable genetic circuits.Science advances · 2026Article
- Synthetic microbial co-cultures for modular bioelectronic sensing in diverse environments.Nature biotechnology · 2026Article
- Bacteria as living biosensors for DNA.Nature reviews bioengineering · 2026Article
- Nanobiosensors: A Potential Tool to Decipher the Nexus Between SARS-CoV-2 Infection and Gut Dysbiosis.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Surface expression of antitoxin on engineered bacteria neutralizes genotoxic colibactin in the gut.Nature microbiology · 2026Article
- Article
- Repurposing the bacterial surface display technology for drug delivery.Advanced drug delivery reviews · 2025Review
- High-fat diet, intestinal microecology and bone loss.Nutrition & metabolism · 2025Review
- Synthetic microbial co-cultures for modular bioelectronic sensing in diverse environments.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Decoding the role of the arginine dihydrolase pathway in shaping human gut community assembly and health-relevant metabolites.Cell systems · 2025Article
- Engineered bacteria: Strategies and applications in cancer immunotherapy.Fundamental research · 2025Review
- Precision microbial regulation: Strategies for modulating GIT microbiota for host health.iMetaOmics · 2025Article
- Systematic representation and optimization enable the inverse design of cross-species regulatory sequences in bacteria.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Partitioning of a 2-bit hash function across 66 communicating cells.Nature chemical biology · 2025Article
- A CRISPR-Cas9 system protecting E. coli against acquisition of antibiotic resistance genes.Scientific reports · 2025Article
118 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The mammalian gut is a dynamic community of symbiotic microbes that interact with the host to impact health, disease, and metabolism. We constructed engineered bacteria that survive in the mammalian gut and sense, remember, and report on their experiences. Based on previous genetic memory systems, we constructed a two-part system with a "trigger element" in which the lambda Cro gene is transcribed from a tetracycline-inducible promoter, and a "memory element" derived from the cI/Cro region of phage lambda. The memory element has an extremely stable cI state and a Cro state that is stable for many cell divisions. When Escherichia coli bearing the memory system are administered to mice treated with anhydrotetracycline, the recovered bacteria all have switched to the Cro state, whereas those administered to untreated mice remain in the cI state. The trigger and memory elements were transferred from E. coli K12 to a newly isolated murine E. coli strain; the stability and switching properties of the memory element were essentially identical in vitro and during passage through mice, but the engineered murine E. coli was more stably established in the mouse gut. This work lays a foundation for the use of synthetic genetic circuits as monitoring systems in complex, ill-defined environments, and may lead to the development of living diagnostics and therapeutics.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.