Engineering metabolic “need”

9:40gives us enthamatin and like makes us um have this octopus superpower, right? And the strategy that they're using is this plug-and-play strategy. It came out in Nature Biotech, growth coupled biosynthesis. That's what they're calling it. Okay. What they're doing is actually quite a quite a simple thing. They're creating a fitness advantage. They're creating an evolutionary advantage for those that are using the server farm. But and what they're doing is they've created what's called an oxotroof. It's an organism that has through some kind of mutation lost the ability to synthesize some essential ingredient. Okay. >> Okay. And the only way it can get this essential ingredient is if it runs the

10:23server farm. [laughter] It runs this mechanical biomechanical pathway that we've installed that gives it that ingredient to let it grow. >> That's that's incred. So >> it's like like if the b if if bacteria had ethics, this would be very problematic. [laughter] >> Very Yeah. Yeah. >> And I'm sure there's people out there that are making that argument. And I mean I don't I don't have good arguments about that. Okay. That's that's not my >> That's not the scope of this this this episode. Uh the ethics of oxotroofes. >> Yeah. But it's it's pretty insane. like it's it's called synthetic oxotrophy. Okay. So, the idea is you have a pathway, right? And on the on the bottom you've got your central pathway that grows the cell that does metabolism and

11:05all that other stuff. And usually the input comes in the input comes in from this side and then it it can fork into two paths. You've got let's say a bunch of carbon atoms. The carbon atoms can go to make more bacteria or it can go to do this um zanthomatin production. this engineered production. If you've got a choice, the bacteria is going to always pick grow myself. Right. >> Right. Evolution dictates that. But if it doesn't have a choice, it has to go through the server farm in order to get the carbon to grow itself. Then it's then actually those that are better >> at doing that artificial um pathway >> are going to have an evolutionary advantage. We've actually used evolution

11:47to our advantage now by creating a foreign zanthamatin production pathway that puts out a byproduct that it needs. This is interesting. We we've we've h we've hijacked our understanding of ev evolution to know that we need to create basically a need for the system to go down the path we want it to in order for it to be more evolutionarily advantaged against others. and and that it it's it's a little bit uh it's it's interesting. >> It's interesting, dude. It's at least [laughter] it's bacteria, man. >> At least >> let's hope they don't scale it up to larger uh ukarios. Yeah, exactly. But [clears throat] anyway, um >> yeah, so they're using they're using

12:27this um this bacteria called um pseudomonus puta. It's a it's a soil bacterium. >> It's got a robust chassis that has a lot of metabolic versatility, meaning that it can it can like eat a bunch of different things. It's not like, you know, there's not one pathway that it can go through. >> It's not vegan. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Even though it's like mostly glucose, it can like eat glucose in multiple different ways. Okay. And um good natural toler to tolerance to substrates and products like anything that's coming out of that factory that we just installed. >> Yes. >> It's got a good tolerance for all sorts of stuff. So, they're using this soil bacterium and what they're doing is they're taking a molecule as hostage.

13:09It's the 510 mthf. It's basically um a C1 carrier. It's a carbon carrier >> for DNA and RNA [clears throat] >> and for proteins. It can't make methionine without this thing and it can't make the A and the G that's in our