jukido
Joined: 31 Aug 2011
Posts: 207
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 Posted: Tue Sep 20, 2011 12:00 am Post subject: There's a climate-controlled room in the middle of Church's |
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There's a climate-controlled room in the middle of Church's generous lab space, where a small tray shakes back and forth, jostling pellets of E. coli DNA.
In a four-hour production process, researchers can turn on or off a single base pair of that DNA, or whole regions of genes to see what happens. The goal is to find a way to improve production of industrial chemicals or medications, or to test viral resistance.
"You could think of this as driving evolution to very rapid rates," Church said. "Sort of evolution on steroids."
The machine is a second-generation Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering (MAGE) machine, built with help from industry; the first one, which sits across the street not far from Church's corner office was a doctoral student's PhD thesis. Another thesis project sits just on the other side of the wall from new MAGE. Called the Polonator, this open-source genome-sequencing machine can read and write a billion base pairs at a time.
These two machines put Church's lab at the forefront of synthetic biology, a burgeoning new field that aims to make things Mother Nature never thought of, like high efficiency, non-polluting fuels, and viruses that can carry cancer drugs safely to a tumour.
With these machines, Prof Church is doing to synthetic biology what he's already done to personalised genomics: making it cheaper, faster and available to everyone.
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