Squeezing more production out of bacteria
Engineering microorganisms to manufacture chemicals is not a new idea: In the 1980s, scientists figured out how to get bacteria to produce insulin, which diabetics need to control their disease. This technique, known as metabolic engineering, involves inserting many copies of the gene for a desired compound into bacteria or yeast cells. Scientists have also used this approach to turn bacteria into tiny factories that can generate biofuels such as ethanol, as well as plastics.MIT chemical engineering professor Kristala Jones Prather and colleagues are now taking genetic manipulation a step further. By tinkering with the genes before inserting them into bacteria, they can manipulate each step of a synthetic reaction inside a cell. That strategy, known as protein engineering, lets researchers use bacteria to make new products, or to boost production of naturally occurring compounds.By combining protein engineering with traditional metabolic engineering, Prather and her colleagues recently induced E. coli...