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The gold-standard diagnostic is a colonoscopy using an endoscope, a device with a camera at the end of a long cord that is threaded into the large intestine. Previously, the researchers developed heme-sensing bacteria that light up in the presence of blood, but the bacterial sensors break down in the digestive system and are hard to collect. After the microspheres traveled through the animals' gastrointestinal systems, the researchers retrieved the sensors from feces with a magnet and found: Microsphere cleanup and signal analysis took about 25 minutes. As the disease stage progressed, the intensity of the light produced by the sensor increased, which indicated more heme from mouse models with more advanced colitis.