It may need four hours to take a picture, and even then only create monochrome images, but the bacterial camera made by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, could be pretty important.

Chris Voigt and his team hacked the genome of E. coli, the common food-poisoning gut microbe, to make it sensitive to light by adding sequences from photosynthesizing algae. When activated by light, the new genes can shut off the action of another gene, in this case one controlling the color of the bacteria. A sufficiently large mass of E. coli can then be used to "print" images. Because the "pixels" are bacteria, the resolution is astounding -- over one hundred megapixels per inch.

The goal of the experiment wasn't to produce a slow, massively high resolution black & white camera, however; the goal was to demonstrate the use of light sensitivity as a control for other bacterial functions.

...their success in getting an array of bacteria to respond to light could lead to the development of "nano-factories" in which minuscule amounts of substances are produced at locations precisely defined by light beams.

For instance, the gene switch need not activate a pigment, says Voigt. A different introduced gene could produce polymer-like proteins, or even precipitate a metal. "This way, the bacteria could weave a complex material," he says. [...]

As a method of nano-manufacturing, the biocamera is an "extremely exciting advance" says Harry Kroto, the Nobel prize-winning discoverer of buckminsterfullerene, or buckyballs. "I have always thought that the first major nanotechnology advances would involve some sort of chemical modification of biology."

This bio-photolithography would be a good way of using microbes to construct macro-scale structures without having to develop complex chemical signalling mechanisms.

The image chosen for the experiment, in case you don't recognize it, is the Flying Spaghetti Monster -- and clearly this work has been touched by its noodly appendages.