Researchers Modify Bacteria to Produce Chemicals on Demand

A team of researchers led by Harvard geneticist George Church at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and Harvard Medical School (HMS) has modified the genes of bacteria that allows them to program what chemical the cells are to produce. Their research was reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

"This advance has implications for pharmaceutical, biofuel, and renewable chemical production," said Wyss Institute Founding Director Donald Ingber.

Their technique makes the desired chemical product vital to the bacteria's survival by making it a requirement in the activation of antibiotic-resistance genes. Only the cells that generate enough of the desired chemical will be completely resistant to the antibiotic and survive to the next round of evolution.

"This is a major direction of growth in synthetic biology, where the focus has mostly been on one-off experiments until this point," said Church.