Doctors can learn a lot about you, voluntarily or not, from what you leave behind after a large coffee. But studying your poop, while a useful diagnostic tool, is just the start. A new study has a novel idea for determining just what’s bothering your colon by ensuring your turds glow under a blacklight.
The idea is from Rice University, which is studying whether elevated levels of thiosulfate causes a painful condition called colitis. The problem is there isn’t really a good method to measure thiosulfate in colons, in this case mouse colons, in the first place. So the team genetically engineered e. Coli bacteria to create a protein in the presence of the sulfur compounds that thiosulfate encourages in the guts that fluoresced green under a common lab light. Sure enough, the mice with tummy troubles passed glowing poop.
Whether or not thiosulfate contributes to colitis is still up in the air, but doctors are intrigued by this glowing poop technique. In theory, the bacteria can be re-engineered to create compounds for any number of chemicals. It’s easy to implement; you just need to eat some yogurt. And it’s easy to check; flip on the correct light and see if your poop glows a certain color. Depending on the compound, they could even change the color of your poop altogether. And as ridiculous and gross as this sounds, it would save everybody involved a lot of pain and money, since the current method of seeing what’s going on in your works is the notorious colonoscopy. Even if you hate yogurt, it’s pretty clear what the better option will be.
(via Gizmodo)