robert karl stonjek

Synthetic Life
Biologists are crafting libraries of interchangeable DNA parts and
assembling them inside microbes to create programmable, living machines
By W. Wayt Gibbs

Evolution is a wellspring of creativity; 3.6 billion years of mutation and
competition have endowed living things with an impressive range of useful
skills. But there is still plenty of room for improvement. Certain microbes
can digest the explosive and carcinogenic chemical TNT, for example--but
wouldn't it be handy if they glowed as they did so, highlighting the
location of buried land mines or contaminated soil? Wormwood shrubs generate
a potent medicine against malaria but only in trace quantities that are
expensive to extract. How many millions of lives could be saved if the
compound, artemisinin, could instead be synthesized cheaply by vats of
bacteria? And although many cancer researchers would trade their eyeteeth
for a cell with a built-in, easy-to-read counter that ticks over reliably
each time it divides, nature apparently has not deemed such a thing fit
enough to survive in the wild.

It may seem a simple matter of genetic engineering to rewire cells to glow
in the presence of a particular toxin, to manufacture an intricate drug, or
to keep track of the cells' age. But creating such biological devices is far
from easy. Biologists have been transplanting genes from one species to
another for 30 years, yet genetic engineering is still more of a craft than
a mature engineering discipline.

Read the rest at Scientific American
http://cl.extm.us/?fe9112787560007f73-fe3016707360067c711779

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek.