Scientists in Cambridge have set up an ambitious synthetic biology company which will rewrite the genetic code of bacteria, enabling the microbes to make a vast range of new materials, from drugs to biodegradable plastics.
Constructive Bio, as the start-up is called, is a spinout from the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology. A scientific team there led by Jason Chin discovered how to add new chemical letters to the code of life, by which the DNA in genes tells cells to make specific biological molecules.
Reprogramming bacteria in this way could lead to microbial factories capable of making novel materials that are not accessible in other ways. In contrast, the latest “gene editing” methods, such as Crispr, manipulate the existing genetic code but do not create new code.