Although “two roads diverged” in Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken,” pathways often converge in science. A few weeks ago, I about the potential good in a bad bacterium. Soon after that, one of my articles mentioned that a combination of .
Those two paths—good from a bad bacterium and a synthetic biology-bioprocessing combination—converged in work by Sungho Jang, PhD, a synthetic biologist and assistant professor at Incheon National University in South Korea, and his colleagues. In Jang’s work, plays the role of bad bacteria. These marine bacteria, the U.
S. National Science Foundation, “are the dominant marine cause of death in humans.” For example, causes the potentially deadly cholera infection.
On the upside of this deadly bacteria, Jang and his colleagues : “Recently, species within the genus, notably and related strains, have emerged as promising next-generation chassis due to their rapid growth rates, versatile substrate utilization, and biosafety level 1 classification.” In particular, Jang’s team pointed out that is useful in the design-build-test-learn cycle of synthetic biology for producing proteins. Part of that comes from this bacteria’s growth rate—potentially doubling in number in less than 10 minutes.
For comparison, that’s about twice as fast as , which has been used often as a synthetic-biology chassis. Before setting loose to grow wildly, the bacteria can be genetically engineered to make, say, a therapeutic protein. co.
