Scientists have broken an “evolutionary deadlock” by genetically engineering microbes with the potential to develop a vast range of new products from drugs to detergents and household plastics.
The researchers at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge used chemical building blocks that do not occur in the genetic code of living organisms to reprogramme bacterial cells into miniature factories with the ability to synthesise novel substances.
The work is the latest advance in the field of synthetic biology, in which technologies from artificial intelligence to gene editing are being used to explore the development of new materials.
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