Science in The News: Synthetic biology. The New York Times has an article today entitled "Custom-made microbes at your service." In what is sure to be the name-droppyist article the Times has ever written, we hear about the recent synthetic biology projects coming out of some of the top labs in the country.

The project with the cleanest explanation must have been Jay Keasling's:

"Jay D. Keasling at the University of California, Berkeley, with part of $42.6 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is trying to take up to 12 genes from the wormwood tree and yeast and get them to work together in E. coli bacteria to produce artemisinin, a malaria drug now extracted from the wormwood tree."

The Times doesn't fully flesh out the motivation, unfortunately. The idea is to take a pharmaceutical product normally produced by wormwood (low concentrations in a slow-growing species), and genetically program E. coli to produce that same substance (high concentrations in a fast-growing species). Since E. coli is the bread-and-butter of molecular biologists, this would be a huge leap for cheap construction of the drug, as well as a great proof-of-principle for a more sustainable, energy-efficient production of non-protein pharmaceuticals in E. coli.

Keasling's lab here at Berkeley has gone full-force into synthetic biology, and is also attempting to genetically modify microbes to be suitable for bioremediation. Biological phosphorus removal, biodesulfurization and removal of heavy metals from contaminated sites are just a few of the projects in the pipeline from synthetic bioremediation projects. And they're getting there; many synthetic biologists have received venture capital funds to commercialize these projects.

Besides remediation, other labs like Graham Fleming here at Berkeley are working to make the familiar chloroplast in plants an industrially viable product. Imagine if chloroplasts could be used industrially to derive energy from the sun, much like photovoltaics— except that chloroplasts enjoy something like 97% energy-transfer efficiency, as opposed to 12% from solar cells... the research is on-going.

One of the quotes that caught my eye was this one:

"[These bacterial population control] demonstrations, however clever, also illustrate problems inherent in designing biological circuits, as opposed to silicon ones. One is that living things are always dividing and evolving."

One of my former housemates in the biophysics program here has re-deployed an old biological technique that gets around this exact problem, and may still be industrially useful. Science is always moving forward... it does feel a little odd to be sitting here shoulder-to-shoulder with those at the forefront though.

There really is a lot of promise in modern molecular biology to solve so many great problems. These problems will require vast resources to address, and the gains will be slower than they were in the 20th century when physics and chemistry were kings, but this is only because modern biology is so young. I can't wait to see what happens next.