3 Innovations in Synthetic Biology
Disruptive startups, cutting-edge research, and creative iGEM projects
When I discovered biotech, the first thing that caught my eye were the unstoppable emerging discoveries. There was CRISPR, longevity science, and something called “synthetic biology”.
To be honest, this last one didn’t seem appealing at all to me at first. There were definitely more papers about using gene editing to cure diabetes than there were about using a weird bacteria to do “whatever they were doing” — if that makes any sense.
Now I see synbio as a concept with the power to grow anything we can imagine, standardize life, and solve the world’s biggest problems
Being a very broad field, when I first started learning about it, I didn’t know where to start. What research papers to read, who to follow, what is important, what is revolutionary, what can be taken to the market, etc. In this article, my mission is to solve those doubts for someone who knows little about synbio. Hopefully it works (:
#3 Energy-creating bacteria
The light bulb was without a doubt the revolutionary invention in the XIX century. Biotech visionaries say that this will be the century for biology. Does this involve bacteria that can generate electricity?!
An exoelectrogen is a type of bacteria that can move electrons to the outside. The term Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC) refers to are a device that use these bacteria to produce electricity by oxidize organic and inorganic matter.
Unfortunately, we are not turning on a light bulb in our houses just yet. However, the wastewater treatment segment is likely to have a huge demand. Certain microorganisms have the ability to remove sulfides as required in wastewater treatment. MFCs can enhance the growth of bioelectrochemically active microbes during wastewater treatment, thus they have good operational stabilities.
Challenges: conductive materials that support bacterial growth have been either inefficient, or not easily programmable to control the electrical current
eForFuel is doesn’t precisely create electricity. They instead, create biofuels out of excess of electricity from renewable sources, waste, water, and bacteria!
This iGEM project aims to leverage the respiratory pathway of a bacteria to boosting the cells’ exoelectrogenic activity.
This other iGEM team from 2013 was able to actually power different LEDs and the motor of a small fan using MFCs! They also 3D printed a container for it.
#2 Artificial Biological Intelligence
This one can be tricky. It’s not doing stuff related to biology on your laptop, but rather, doing what your laptop does but with biology.
In other words, what I like to call Artificial Biological Intelligence (ABI) has more to do with biological computing than with computational biology.
If you’re into biotech and genetic engineering specifically, you’ve probably heard about this idea of engineering biology, or reverse engineering biology. You know, it’s funny because with ABI we are reverse, reverse engineering biology.
Artificial Intelligence is a field of computer science that is completely revolutionizing the way we treat data and make sense out of it. It’s like giving computers a super-power.
Well, some types of AI called Artificial Neural Networks, are based off of the architecture of the human brain, which means that AI is a way of reverse engineering the brain: reverse engineering biology.
What’s interesting with ABI, is that we are replicating Artificial Neural Networks, but with DNA. This is, we are creating biological computers that work at the molecular level.
Ready to get your mind blown? Researchers from Caltech were able to create a Neural Network that can correctly identify handwritten numbers. This absolutely blew my mind when I first read about it.
On to the science behind it now. Each molecular number is made up of 20 unique DNA strands, each assigned to represent an individual pixel in any 10 by 10 pattern. Afterwards, these DNA strands are mixed together in a test tube.
Given a particular example of molecular handwriting, the DNA neural network can classify it into up to nine categories, each representing one of the nine possible handwritten digits from 1 to 9.
As we know, this could represent a revolutionary technology depending on its applications. The same “smart soup” can be trained to perform different tasks.
#1 Biofactories
Not a lot of people talk about the term bio factories in the context of synbio (or at least not yet). What I personally understand for this concept, is living things creating/synthesizing materials.
One of the concepts that I really, truly, absolutely love about biotechnology is this idea of being able to grow anything. Just as programers like to say “it’s time to build”, I think biological engineers can say:
I could actually create a whole new article on bio-manufacturing. As of now, we’ll have mini-sections. Let’s jump into it…
Justice for animals
According to World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), over the past 40 years, the number of wildlife has dropped 67% due to the raging poaching. The hunting is no longer necessity-driven, but exploitation and consumerism driven (in most cases).
What about current alternatives? Well, according to the research made, these are mostly artificial leathers made out of plastic materials, in which the product and the manufacturing process will still have an inevitable damage to the environment.
So what if I told you that there were a group of high schoolers who replicated that same leather that we know, but with bacteria?!
They used G. xylinus to synthesize bacterial cellulose, and integrated it with protein crosslinking (two types of spider fibroins) into manufacturing artificial leather 🙌.
Cellulose is basically a very strong biomaterial, present in many structures of living things. Further, leather typically also a protein network. That’s where the spider proteins come in.
Bio has style
I’m 100% more on the side of using science to solve the world’s biggest problems first. That’s why even when I find this project “cool”, it’s not my favorite.
The idea: hair dye created with bacteria so it “doesn’t damage your hair cortex”.
According to this iGEM team, chemical synthesis of dyes can damage the hair cortex and be expensive, so they modified a bacterial pathway to synthesize melanin indigo, dopaxathin, among other substances to dye hair into cyan, magenta, yellow, and black colors.
Still in the world of fashion though, we can find that there are companies that are working on making a more sustainable type of fabric. Now, that sounds more interesting…
Mango Materials is using bacteria to turn methane into bioplastics for clothing and other goods, creating a sustainable alternative to petroleum-based polyester, among other innovations.
Beauty of life and life in beauty
Many of the personal care products you are using today are likely made from petroleum-based chemicals. Introducing Amyris…
From low-cost nutraceuticals to pioneering a zero-calorie sugar replacement, we are helping create products that are good for people and good for the planet.
One of their products consists in the biosynthesis to create squalene, an important moisturizer and antioxidant found in many personal care products. In 2015, they launched Biossance, a brand that creates clean ingredients through synthetic biology and has become a top-seller at Sephora stores in the US.
From what I’ve seen, the most popular company for synbio-based cosmetics, is Geltor. They biologically synthesize collagen, a protein used in personal care that normally comes from the connective tissues of cows.
Biology eats the world!
That’s actually the name of a good podcast around the biotech revolution 👀. What I’m about to tell you is something more like the world eating biology.
Some mothers have problems when feeding their babies. Formula milk is different from breast milk since it lacks some important proteins like β casein, κ casein, lactoferrin, and α-lactalbumin.
A high school iGEM team took initiative to synthesize these proteins by transfecting the CSN2, CSN3, LTF, and LALBA genes into yeasts.
Due to the current pandemic, they found some difficulties in transferring their designs to the lab, but I encourage you to check out their research on their project website:
