Science Alert reports on the latest superpower to be replicated in the lab with a UC San Diego team producing xanthommatin, the pigment chemical responsible for octopus’ amazing ability to camouflage themselves in their environment:
The researchers technically didn’t make the pigment. They bioengineered bacteria to make it, coaxing microbes to not only produce this rare substance, but to do so with unprecedented efficiency, yielding up to 1,000 times more xanthommatin than previous methods.
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To get high yields from reluctant bacteria, they used a new method they call “growth-coupled biosynthesis,” which incentivized bacteria to make lots of xanthommatin by connecting their survival to pigment production.
“We needed a whole new approach to address this problem,” says lead author Leah Bushin, who led the study in the Moore Lab at Scripps Oceanography.
“Essentially, we came up with a way to trick the bacteria into making more of the material that we needed.”
Bacteria are practical organisms, and they don’t like to waste their meager resources making products that aren’t strictly necessary for their survival.
So, Bushin and her colleagues made the bacteria an offer they couldn’t refuse. They genetically engineered “sick” cells, which could only grow if they continued producing two compounds: xanthommatin and formic acid.
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You can read more of the camouflage-pigment research here, in Nature Biotechnology.