Is There Nothing E. coli Cannot Do? The Borg Edition

In my book Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life, I describe how this humble germ helped make modern biology possible–and, in the process, has been engineered to do all sorts of remarkable things. In 2008, I blogged a fresh example, courtesy of Jeff Hasty and his colleagues. They retooled the bacteria to flash in clock-like rhythms. Now Hasty has taken another step forward, rejiggering E. coli so that millions of bacteria can flash in waves. The new paper's in Nature, and the...