After ten thousand years of genetic manipulation by selective breeding
humans finally gained direct access
to the genetic code
Deoxyribonucleic acid
D-N-A.
Since then we've cut and pasted it
photocopied fragments of it en masse,
sped read it was sequences
printed out the code letter by letter in the lab
modeled it on computers
and measured it with microscopes.
For forty years now we've called this work genetic engineering
the trouble is that while there's been an extraordinary amount of genetic
discovery in manipulation
there's been precious little engineering
engineers are frustrated by genetics and molecular biology.
The experiments are too slow
the complexity to messy
and growing more so all the time
and there's a frustrating lack of standardised components.
They'd like to do to genetic engineering what engineers and done since the stone age:
collect, refine and repackage nature
so that it's easier to make new and reliable things.
Engineers want to treat DNA more like a programming language -
instead of one's and zero's,
'A' 'T' 'G' and 'C'.
They want to use DNA to write simple Lego like functional components
inspired by, but not found, in nature
and then run them in a cell
instead of the computer.
The only difference is this software
builds its own hardware.
They call this re-engineered genetic engineering
synthetic biology
Nowadays rather than cut and paste the DNA sequence out of an organism and
into another
you can, if you know what you're doing,
just type your DNA sequence into a computer,
or copy it from a database, or even select it from a growing component catalog
and then you just order it over the internet.
Yes really.
The DNA sequence may be copied from nature but the DNA itself
is made by machine.
It's synthetic.
The raw material for synthesizing DNA is sugar.
Twenty five dollars of which will buy you enough to make a copy of every human
genome on the planet.
The chemical letters are fed to the DNA equivalent of an industrial
inkjet printer.
In goes your sequence information
and out comes DNA.
At a cost of less than forty cents per base pair
and getting cheaper all the time.
It's then freeze-dried
and shipped to your door.
Already engineers have assembled an open source catalog of over five thousand
standardised components
called
BioBricks.
At an annual worldwide do-it-yourself competition
university students build new and more complex BioBricks,
string them together
and then run them inside a much studied intestinal bacteria:
E.-coli.
Sure they're toy projects with shoe string budgets but the results are impressive.
E. Chromi:
a sensitivity tuner and colour generator
is programmed to turn one of five colors when it detects a certain concentration
of an environmental toxin.
E. Coliroid is a bacterial system which switches on and off in response to red light
and acts like a bacterial Polaroid camera.
Groups with more time and a lot more money
are writing,
or as they say in computer programming
refactoring, whole systems.
Jay Keisling
chemical and biological engineer
and his team at UC Berkeley
have built and continually refined
a new metabolic pathway in yeast
by assembling 10 genes from three organisms
in an attempt to produce synthetically
the antimalarial drug Artemisinin,
and to do it cheaply enough to treat up to two hundred million malaria suffers
each year.
Biotechnology pioneer Craig Venter
has gone even further.
His team has entirely replaced the DNA of one bacterium
with the syntehtic copy of DNA
from another naturally occurring species,
and added a few extras like their email address.
This wasn't creating life it was testing just how reprogrammable a bacterial cell
can be.
An important step
if we want biological factories which can be tasked to make many things
liked vaccine, medicine
food and even fuel.
In the last ten thousand years genetics has taken us from gathering seeds
to manipulating DNA.
An engineering has taken us from rocks and caves to hand-held computers
and skyscrapers.
We can only guess what the two working together as synthetic biology
may help us to cheap in the future but the possibilities are breathtaking:
Engineering algae that can eat climate changing carbon dioxide and produce less
polluting biofuels.
We might do away with both liver and kidney transplants
and instead use a vat grown all-purpose biological sieve organ
called a kliver.
We could can change the nature of construction, architecture, urban planning,
forestry,
and even gardening
with a seed that can grow
into a house,
or even return life to a whole planet
by terraforming the long dead Mars.
Til then synthetic biology advances project by project
As Drew Endy, the civil engineer turned synthetic biologist says:
"Testing of understanding by building is the shortest path to demonstrating what
you know
and what you don't."
In so doing Synthetic biology is already paying dividends
by simultaneously expanding and testing
our knowledge of cellular function.