Michael Pollan Calls for Open Source Genetic Engineering

Try this at home by Daniel Grushkin

The next big scientific breakthrough may come from a garage, not a lab, with do-it-yourself biologists popping up everywhere. Genetic tinkerer Daniel Grushkin has a message for the curious: go ahead, try this at home. 

In the scientific journals, we’ve been labeled biotech hobbyists, citizen scientists, even biohackers.

Last December, seven of us opened the first community lab, called Genspace. Though it’s a fully functional lab, it has a decidedly hacked-together aesthetic. We built it in a Brooklyn, N.Y., warehouse that was converted into a workspace for architects and designers. At the center of the floor sits a glass cube made of found objects. The walls are created from windows and sliding glass doors saved from demo sites. The lab benches are stainless steel tables salvaged from industrial kitchens. Most of the equipment was donated by a biotech company that downsized during the economic crisis.

We incorporated Genspace as a nonprofit to serve as a shared lab, a nursery for biotech tinkerers. Our members include an entrepreneur with great ideas but a miniscule budget, an artist employing single-celled organisms for an experimental design palette, a molecular biologist with a penchant for mentorship, and folks like me, who want to learn by creating novel organisms.

Programmable cells: Interfacing natural and engineered gene networks

Article From Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

(Full-text available)

Abstract:

Novel cellular behaviors and characteristics can be obtained by coupling engineered gene networks to the cell's natural regulatory circuitry through appropriately designed input and output interfaces. Here, we demonstrate how an engineered genetic circuit can be used to construct cells that respond to biological signals in a predetermined and programmable fashion. We employ a modular design strategy to create Escherichia coli strains where a genetic toggle switch is interfaced with: (i) the SOS signaling pathway responding to DNA damage, and (ii) a transgenic quorum sensing signaling pathway from Vibrio fischeri. The genetic toggle switch endows these strains with binary response dynamics and an epigenetic inheritance that supports a persistent phenotypic alteration in response to transient signals. These features are exploited to engineer cells that form biofilms in response to DNA-damaging agents and cells that activate protein synthesis when the cell population reaches a critical density. Our work represents a step toward the development of “plug-and-play” genetic circuitry that can be used to create cells with programmable behaviors.

Here is a fine discussion of the above article from an Openwetware blog.