Designer microbes All around us, upon us, within us, and underneath us, nature is doing some pretty gnarly stuff. Think about those dogs who can be trained to ‘sniff out cancer’, the bacteria living inside the pores on your face using the oils on your skin as food, the cells in your pancreas making insulin to help your body manage sugar spikes, the bacteria living in the soil which give plants the ability to take-up nitrogen from their roots4-7. All these funky processes are essentially enzymedriven reactions (substrate + enzyme = product). And if an enzyme-driven reaction can be found in nature, then it can be “copied & pasted” into a microorganism, turning it into a bioengineered designer microbe, if you will. That’s not to say that designer microbes will necessarily play ball and do what you’ve asked, but some synbio companies have managed to tinker with microbial biology in a way that has led to successful human:microbe collaborations. For example, Bolt Threads “copied” genes encoding enzymatic reactions that make spider silk and “pasted” them into baker’s yeast, resulting in a designer yeast able to make a soft yet durable textile more sustainably than conventional cotton farming practices8. Similarly, Amyris Inc. “copy & pasted” genes encoding reactions into bacteria to enhance their natural ability to produce farnesene as a commercially viable bio-based jet fuel9. London based designer, Natsai Audrey Chieza, spent many years developing new ways of dyeing textiles in collaboration with the naturally occurring and pigment-producing microbe, Streptomyces
coelicolor. In 2018, she was awarded a creative residency at Ginkgo Bioworks in which she was exploring how she might harness synthetic biology to address issues of scaling-up this new dyeing practice10. These new ways of working with bioengineered living microscopic organisms—ways that are often preferential to conventional methods of agriculture or destructive extraction processes— might force us to reflect and ask ourselves some deep questions. Like, how do we perceive what ‘natural’ even means? And how can we ascribe value and trust to things we find in (or engineer into) nature? What does it mean to turn nature into technology, something Indigenous cultures across the world have done for thousands of years, but in very different ways?
Taking strategies from nature and applying them to biotechnologies Whatever product you might want to make in a microbe—be that a rose fragrance for cosmetics, or a natural dye to colour fabrics, or spider silk to weave new textiles—you will need to think about supply chain networks. But not the kind that involve trucks and storage facilities and depots; no, we are talking about biochemistry. Those funky processes happening all the time, which are invisible to us, but make us and the natural world around us possible. Synbio is largely about looking at those microscopic supply chain networks, the ones occurring within microbes, and asking, “How can we improve or engineer them to do x, y, or z, for us or with us?”.
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