What time is it? Maybe the E. coli in your intestines will tell you some day. Scientists at the University of California at San Diego have created a “clock” made of genetically engineered bacteria. The bacteria rhythmically flash blue light like a bulb on a string of Christmas tree lights. While stopwatches in your GI tract may never happen (which might be a good thing…), artificial biological oscillators like the light show in a Petri dish in San Diego may be used in the future to make time-sensitive drug delivery devices and to help understand many of the natural timepieces that underlie both normal physiology and some diseases. (Read more…)