Variable Fragment

I came across a short piece in the New York Times recently that’s worth pointing out. It’s about a particular startup in the Bay Area that’s focused on using metabolic engineering to produce anti-malarial drugs and the next item on their agenda is fuel.

For the layperson, metabolic engineering is a step beyond genetic engineering. Metabolic engineering involves creating a new network of complementary reaction pathways within a cell, essentially creating whole new ways of making biological products. In a big picture sense, metabolic engineering treats the cell as a factory, and adds or optimizes structures within the cell for some design purpose.

Mr. Keasling’s metabolic engineering is farther-reaching and, potentially, much more productive. His lab has invented techniques that rewrite the metabolisms of microorganisms. By modifying the structure of a microorganism’s proteins and adding genes from other organisms, Mr. Keasling has designed microbial factories that can produce a tremendous variety of drugs, biofuels and other chemicals.

The article describes their approach to antimalarial drug manufacture is to create artemisinin using E. coli instead of extracting it from a rare plant. Generally speaking, producing products in bacteria is an expensive option, but in this case the the alternative is even more costly.

What’s most interesting to me is that they have funding to pursue converting “sugar into fuel.” They give as an example converting switchgrass, which says to me that they really mean that they intend to solve the cellulose to ethanol problem. It’s a big deal, and a lot of people are working on it, but if they are able to do it then they’ll have something pretty cool on their hands. Cellulosic ethanol is a complicated issue, and the economics are not straighforward, but it’s something which has a lot of potential. And “sugar into fuel,” well, cellulose is polymerized glucose, just like starch, but I think it’s a stretch to call it “sugar.” But I can forgive the NYT for simplifying.