E. Coli reeks - how to fix it

Heard a funny story on the radio this morning.  Some bio-engineering students at MIT spent a lot of time working with E. Coli bacteria.   I guess they would start it growing and have to spend a long time waiting for it to mature.  And then they would do some highly advanced sciency thing with them.

It turns out E. Coli reeks.  It smells awful.  Like poo.  So their lab always smelled like an outhouse.  They got fed up with it and decided to do something to improve the world. 

They sent off to Purdue for some samples of petunia cells.  They pulled the (get this) wintergreen out of it and put it in to the foul smelling bacteria!  Now their lab smells like wintergreen!

(I don’t know how they chose wintergreen, but why not?)

Funny stuff.

But they didn’t stop there.  Since they spent so much time waiting they figured out how to insert a trigger in the bacteria so that once it matured it would stop issuing wintergreen scent and start issuing … banana.

Great.  They got an engineer’s sense of humor.