The vast majority of the things we see, touch and use in our everyday lives are derived from petroleum, which provides the chemical building blocks for countless consumer staples.
We have, however, begun to reach the combinatorial limits of these simple building blocks. The materials we use in everyday life look much as they did 100 years ago; material innovation has stalled from lack of new molecular ingredients.
At the same time, the demands we place on materials have increased. We are now looking to biological materials to solve challenges that were once thought to be engineering problems – for example, developing cellular processes to desalinate water more efficiently; creating biological molecules that will help us build more comfortable medical prosthetics; and engineering microbes that could clean up underwater oil spills. From this year, we will find the building blocks for these materials not in petroleum-based technologies, but in biology.
Biology gives us access to a vast set of chemical building blocks to make novel materials, many of which may also have lower environmental impacts than oil-based goods. We can use – and transform – the naturally evolved cellular machineries of yeast, bacteria and filamentous fungi to fabricate new molecules in an efficient, economical and often environmentally sustainable ways.
We have long understood the possibility of manufacturing materials in living organisms. Until recently, however, the complexity and unpredictability of biological systems have prevented us from making substantial progress in engineering biology. There are far more ways to alter the DNA of a simple, single-celled organism, for example, than there are atoms in the universe. Traditional manual approaches have not allowed scientists to understand and exploit these possibilities to the full. Using advanced computing techniques and automation, however, we are now able to explore the huge search space of biology, allowing us to move into a world of biological manufacturing.
Taking advantage of the vast number of possibilities within a genome requires novel techniques and interdisciplinary innovation. My company, Zymergen, combines traditional hypothesis-testing with an automated approach that allows us to design thousands of “test everything” experiments that target both on- and off-pathway genes. We use machine learning and high-throughput lab methods to modify a microbe’s genome and measure the resulting outward changes.
This way we can find genetic modifications that had an impact on a particular trait without necessarily understanding why the changes resulted in that phenotype. (In fact, many useful traits result from changes to genes for which there is as yet no known function, successes that would be almost impossible to engineer using conventional hypothesis testing).
In 2019, we will see discoveries of many new biological molecules, as well as new ways to produce known substances in microorganisms. Researchers have already found novel adhesives and coatings based on biological materials, which they have been able to produce in engineered microorganisms.
Companies such as Bolt Threads – based in Emeryville, California – have engineered microbes to produce molecules that can be made into thread that is structurally similar to spider silk. In the next year, we expect to use the same approach to uncover molecules that will eventually replace wool. And we're already seeing the development of animal-free meat intended to replace ground beef, engineered by companies such as Impossible Foods, which works to produce heme-type proteins in yeast.
2019 will be the year in which we discover molecules and properties that are as yet unknown to humans. The breadth of biology and the enormous flexibility of genetic material will provide us with an ideal platform to explore an effectively unlimited number of molecules for novel materials and solutions. We will ultimately leave behind hydrocarbons and truly enter the biological age.
Joshua Hoffman is cofounder and CEO of Zymergen
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
