427: Simple Cells Stay Strong

This episode: Bacterial cells with their genomes removed can
still be active and useful!


Download Episode (10.2 MB, 14.9 minutes)

Show notes:
Microbe of the episode: Rosavirus A

Takeaways



Microbes have amazing biochemical transformation abilities,
creating and breaking down many compounds and proteins. This
makes them great candidates for many purposes, in medicine,
industry, and environmental remediation. In some of these
purposes, though, there are risks associated with adding
foreign microbes, especially engineered ones, that can
replicate themselves and possibly persist, into new places.


 


To avoid this risk, this study turns intact bacteria into
SimCells, simplified entities with most of their genetic
material removed, leaving only the proteins and other
components and just enough DNA to accomplish desired tasks.
These SimCells were able to continue performing tasks for
around 10 days before running out of the cellular resources
needed to keep going. One of these tasks was producing a
compound that damaged cancer cells in a dish but left
non-cancerous cells unharmed.




Journal Paper:
Fan C, Davison PA, Habgood R, Zeng H, Decker CM, Salazar MG,
Lueangwattanapong K, Townley HE, Yang A, Thompson IP, Ye H, Cui
Z, Schmidt F, Hunter CN, Huang WE. 2020. Chromosome-free
bacterial cells are safe and programmable platforms for synthetic
biology. Proc Natl Acad Sci 117:6752–6761.


Other interesting stories:



Biofuel-producing bacteria can generate electricity at the
same time (paper)

Using dried microbial biomass as fertilizer works pretty
well (paper)




 


Email questions or comments to bacteriofiles at gmail dot
com. Thanks for listening!


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