What do you get if you cross a rat, a jellyfish and brewer’s yeast? Happily, the answer is not the latest genetically modified food, but a low-cost explosives detector.
Danny Dhanasekaran, a molecular biologist at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has coaxed a simple yeast into harnessing a rat’s sense of smell to sniff the explosive trinitrotoluene (TNT), a primary ingredient in many explosive devices. When it finds it, the yeast emits a warning using the jellyfish’s ability to softly glow.
Funded by the Pentagon’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, Dhanasekaran hopes to create a lightweight detector that is much…
