Researchers have reproduced the entire biochemical pathway for how coca plants make cocaine in another plant, which could help people manufacture the drug for scientific study
I once studied how to make E. Coli turn waste sugars into plastic precursors. The conclusion of the research paper I read was that making plastic was economically nonviable, I believe, because the cost of the sugar was more than the amount of chemical you could get the bugs to produce. They did hundreds of different optimizations of the Krebs cycle and got it pretty good, but it still wasn't there.
E. Coli is a simple organism with strains made non-infectious that can accept plasmids. Plasmids are pieces of DNA that you can custom order with whatever genes you want. For example, there are radioactivity resistant Deinococcus radiodurans and radioactivity eating Geobacter sp. (though the mechanism of eating radioactive material appears to be elusive). If you wanted to do a bio-remediation project, you could Frankenstein an E. Coli with plasmids from those two and put them into Chernobyl to attempt to get rid of some of the radioactivity (and then proceed to infect a 100 square km radius of people living nearby with spontaneously transformed, reinfections E. Coli thereby making the problem worse).
Bioengineering is an interesting field. No doubt incredibly frustrating and fleeting in its efficacy without well established methods.
Check out the chart in this study titled "Downstream processing of recombinant human insulin and its analogues production from E. coli inclusion bodies" for a neat chart on how E. Coli with plasmids make insulin. I think this process happen(s/ed) at scale in giant vats. https://bioresourcesbioprocessing.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40643-021-00419-w
Edit: Holy shit I found the paper from the first paragraph titled "Metabolic engineering of Escherichia coli for direct production of 1,4-butanediol" https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51156399_Metabolic_engineering_of_Escherichia_coli_for_direct_production_of_14-butanediol
Wait... so E.Coli could produce coke?
oh boy oh boy, eating undercooked food has never been funner.
I once studied how to make E. Coli turn waste sugars into plastic precursors. The conclusion of the research paper I read was that making plastic was economically nonviable, I believe, because the cost of the sugar was more than the amount of chemical you could get the bugs to produce. They did hundreds of different optimizations of the Krebs cycle and got it pretty good, but it still wasn't there.
E. Coli is a simple organism with strains made non-infectious that can accept plasmids. Plasmids are pieces of DNA that you can custom order with whatever genes you want. For example, there are radioactivity resistant Deinococcus radiodurans and radioactivity eating Geobacter sp. (though the mechanism of eating radioactive material appears to be elusive). If you wanted to do a bio-remediation project, you could Frankenstein an E. Coli with plasmids from those two and put them into Chernobyl to attempt to get rid of some of the radioactivity (and then proceed to infect a 100 square km radius of people living nearby with spontaneously transformed, reinfections E. Coli thereby making the problem worse).
Bioengineering is an interesting field. No doubt incredibly frustrating and fleeting in its efficacy without well established methods.
Check out the chart in this study titled "Downstream processing of recombinant human insulin and its analogues production from E. coli inclusion bodies" for a neat chart on how E. Coli with plasmids make insulin. I think this process happen(s/ed) at scale in giant vats. https://bioresourcesbioprocessing.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40643-021-00419-w
Edit: Holy shit I found the paper from the first paragraph titled "Metabolic engineering of Escherichia coli for direct production of 1,4-butanediol" https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51156399_Metabolic_engineering_of_Escherichia_coli_for_direct_production_of_14-butanediol