Microscope Images of
Simple Synthetic Biological System

These are photographs of the same strain of E.coli taken with a Nikon Eclipse E800 fluorescent microscope under two different conditions. The images illustrate a simple synthetic biological component that I constructed during the summer of 2004. When transformed into E.coli the component acts as a reporter for the LacI and Tet repressors. For example, in the left image the E.coli have not been exposed to tetracycline and thus they constitutively express a fluorescent protein, while in the right image the E.coli have been exposed to tetracycline which represses production of the fluorescent protein. These reporter components are a key tool in synthetic biology for essentially observing the "outputs" of a system.