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Podcast: Soundscape of the deep ocean
A new form of bioengineering ditches the cell and could speed up innovation. Five…Continue reading
Source: Economist
Cell-free biotech will make for better products
THE stuff of life comes wrapped in tiny bags called cells. Inside are DNA molecules that carry the instructions for how to run the cell, to make it grow, and to cause it, ultimately, to divide into two cells, if that is to be its fate. Messages made of a slightly different molecule, RNA, carry these instructions to molecular machines called ribosomes. A ribosome’s job is to read the RNA messages and translate them into proteins, the workhorse molecules of cells. Those proteins then supervise and execute the running, the growing and the dividing.
It is a system that has worked well over the 4bn years that life has existed on Earth. To some biotechnologists, though, the cell is old hat. They approve of the machinery of DNA, RNA, ribosomes and proteins, which can be engineered to make useful chemicals, ranging from drugs to the building-blocks of plastics. But they want to get rid of the bags that contain it, retaining only the part of the protoplasmic “gloop” inside a cell needed to do their bidding.
In this way they hope to control, far more precisely than is possible by conventional genetic engineering (or even by improved methods of gene modification,…Continue reading
Source: Economist