In 1974, Waclaw Szybalski, a cancer specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, described a radical vision of the future. He foresaw a world where scientists had mastered biology to the point of creating life from scratch. His prediction was not far off the mark. Today, “synthetic biology” ” the phrase was coined by Szybalski ” is one of the most exciting avenues of modern science. Research on artificial life is under way; synthetic viruses a reality. But the swift progress of the field has raised hopes and fears in equal measure. While some argue that the work points the way to green energy and greater food production, others fear synthetic bugs might escape from the lab and spark a catastrophe.
There is no doubt that synthetic biology is delivering. One of the leading lights in the field is Jay Keasling, a professor of bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley and CEO of the US Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI). Five years ago, he created yeast cells that eat sugar and convert it into a frontline drug for malaria. It was more than a neat laboratory trick. A new facility being built in Italy will put the bugs to good use and make the drug artemisinin, quickly and cheaply. With each dose expected to cost around 15p, Keasling’s bugs could save the lives of millions. Now he is switching his attention to finding a replacement for jet fuel and diesel.
When will your malaria drug be available for the developing world?
The work has gone incredibly well. The projection is that it will be out by the end of this year or early next year. That’s just in time for a big shortage of artemisinin, so if this wasn’t coming along, we might see the price of the drug spike. This will stabilise the market and give people affordable, high-quality drugs.
What are you working on now?
We’re taking what we learned from the malaria drug and using it to make fuels and chemicals. At the Joint BioEnergy Institute, we are working on drop-in fuels, that is, fuels that work directly with our existing infrastructure, which are pretty much identical to gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.
Crops are already grown to produce ethanol for engines. What is the advantage of your approach?
Ethanol is great for a small fraction of fuel, but you can only use it up to 10% in automobiles and you can’t use it in diesel engines or jet engines. It seems to me that instead of changing our $3 trillion transport infrastructure to suit a fuel like ethanol, why don’t we change the biology to build a fuel that will work with that existing infrastructure? There are so many advantages in doing it that way and it’s what we’re focused on.
What fuels will you look at first?
We want to focus on those fuels that will be the best ones to replace. If you think about it, we can drive smaller passenger cars, we can electrify, at least in part, our passenger car fleet, with hybrids and whatever. But with heavy trucks and trains and specifically planes, the situation is much more challenging. We’re not going to have electric planes. We need to replace jet fuel and diesel.
What will you use to make them?
We’ve shown we can use yeast and E.coli bacteria to take in sugar and transform it into valuable chemicals such as artemisinin. The sugar is our source of hydrocarbons, so rather than petroleum from the ground, we start with sugar. When I say sugar, that can be sucrose from sugarcane, or the sugars you get from cellulosic biomass. We can use paper waste, trees that have fallen down in the forest, corn stovers, that is everything but the kernel of corn, and dedicated energy crops such as switchgrass.
How easy is it to make fuel from microbes?
About a year ago, we published a paper in Nature where we engineered E.coli to produce a diesel fuel. The beauty of it was that the E.coli took in the sugar, transformed it directly into diesel, and the diesel was secreted outside the cell. Because it’s oily, the diesel floats to the top. So unlike ethanol, which you have to distil to get it pure enough to use in an engine, the diesel purifies itself. That reduces the cost and the amount of energy needed to make it.
Will your diesel be as good as the fuel at the pump?
It’s as good, if not better. Fuel is incredibly complicated ” it has many different components and it’s optimised for different things. We can build the fuel from the most valuable molecules, so we don’t have the unwanted components that existing fuels have. You get better gas mileage out of it and cleaner emissions. And we’re talking about a substantial improvement for the environment. Our diesel reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 80%, which is pretty substantial.
The world uses around 90 million barrels of oil a day. How can bugs compete?
We’re looking at replacing 30% of transportation fuel in, say, a 20- to 30-year period. That is a huge undertaking. We are going to develop the technology to make the fuels and license them out. In the next 10 to 20 years, we’ll see a very diverse range of companies all working with different techniques to make fuels.
How will your work affect the giant oil companies?
The energy business is the biggest sector in the world, and the beauty about working in the biggest industry on the planet is that there is room for everybody. Exxon is the largest company in the US, but it has only 5% of the transportation fuel market. That alone tells you that anybody can play.
Will synthetic biology be used to make more than fuels?
As well as fuels, we are looking at everything else we produce from petroleum, including polymers and plastics, and asking: can we go in and replace those? I don’t see any reason why we can’t make almost any chemical we want from sugar, a renewable resource. It’s a great time to be in biology and biotechnology, because we have so many more tools and it’s so much more powerful than it used to be.
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