This is a scientific American 60 second science. I'm Cynthia Graber. Got a minute?

Probiotics are hot.

Bacteria that we consume in foods like yogurt, mees, and pickles can help our gut

microbiome stay happy and healthy. Now there might be another role for

those probiotic bacteria, cancer detection. Two papers in the journal

Science Translational Medicine explain how researchers hope to get bacteria

to be diagnostic tools.

Sanghitobatia of MIT is a liver expert and senior author of one of the papers.

Her lab had been trying to figure out how to get

nanoparticles to the liver that would send a signal

detectable in urine if they encountered a tumor.

Cancers that start in the colon or pancreas can metastasize to the

liver, which can be deadly.

And one of the students on the team had the idea that if you could imagine that there's

a material, it's a diagnostic material that would grow itself, then you wouldn't need very much of it to arrive at the tumor

and it could sort of self-amplify.

And we realize that bacteria are in many ways just such a device, that they can naturally home in on tumors. So we

thought maybe we could hijack that ability of bacteria to home in on tumors and

self-amplify to create urinary diagnostic.

Batche's lab teamed up with a lab at the University of California,

San Diego with expertise in synthetic biology,

basically altering microbes to have specific functions.

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