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Environmental biotechnology

Environmental monitoring from the air with hyperspectral reporters

Nature Biotechnology (2025)Cite this article

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Hyperspectral reporters allow bacteria on the ground to be imaged by high-flying drones, expanding environmental monitoring to large outdoor areas.

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Fig. 1: Hyperspectral reporters enable remote biosensing from engineered microbes.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, UCSB, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Maxwell Z. Wilson

  2. Department of BioEngineering, UCSB, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Maxwell Z. Wilson

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  1. Maxwell Z. Wilson
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Correspondence to Maxwell Z. Wilson.

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Competing interests

M.Z.W. is a co-founder and the chief scientific officer of Integrated Biosciences, a biotechnology company developing therapeutics unrelated to the environmental sensing technologies discussed in this article.

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Wilson, M.Z. Environmental monitoring from the air with hyperspectral reporters. Nat Biotechnol (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-025-02668-y

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