Frontiers of Engineering Reports on Leading-Edge Engineering from the 2019 Symposium (2020) / Chapter Skim
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Microbes and Manufacturing: Moore's Law Meets Biology - Patrick Boyle
Microbes and Manufacturing: Moore's Law Meets Biology - Patrick Boyle
Pages 45-54
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From page 45... ...
Even nonbiological technology like petrochemistry uses building blocks that were once biological: petrochemicals, the defining building block of 20th century manufacturing, are derived from the decomposition of pre istoric biomass. h BACKGROUND For more than 4 billion years, biology has been evolving solutions that scientists and engineers are only now beginning to understand and adapt.
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From page 46... ...
In the 20th century, the advent of genetic tools and the ability to read and write DNA allowed biologists to consider directly engineering biological organisms for the first time. Many of the early examples of genetic engineering have been extraordinarily successful: human insulin produced in microbes, developed by Genentech in the 1980s, allowed a transition away from the use of animal insulins isolated from pig and cow pancreases (Fraser 2016)
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From page 47... ...
. Synthetic biology combines efforts from many fields: computer science and electrical engineering abstractions to describe cellular circuitry, metabolic engineering to engineer the metabolic pathways of cells, genetics to understand the control elements of gene expression, and systems biology to measure and simulate cellular systems, among others.
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From page 48... ...
Synthetic biologists seek to identify and take advantage of modular subunits of biology as reusable parts, to allow the design of more complex systems. For example, genetic control switches such as promoters (the DNA elements that control transcription of a gene into messenger RNA)
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From page 49... ...
Systems biology, modeling of cellular systems, and data science have enabled synthetic biologists to develop better design algorithms. As in many other fields, machine and deep learning methods are being applied to large biological datasets to refine biological designs (Camacho et al.
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From page 50... ...
, and deep learning research to identify engineered DNA in sequencing experiments.1 APPLICATIONS OF ENGINEERED BIOLOGY Many of the current applications of engineered biology are products of engineered microbes. Microbes have a number of properties that make them useful to engineers: they exhibit fast growth rates, have many genetic tools, and can produce products at commercial scale via fermentation.
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From page 51... ...
Similarly, there has been a growing interest in the production of animal proteins in microbes, allowing vegan production of meat and other animal products without harm to animals. Products such as the mpossible Burger by Impossible I Foods in California use microbially produced leghemoglobin protein as a replacement for the hemoglobin proteins that contribute to meat flavor (Wolf 2019)
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From page 52... ...
2018. Why is global aeronautics leader Airbus partnering with synthetic biol ogy startup AMSilk?
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From page 53... ...
van den Heuvel M, Dekker C
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