The plug-and-play growth-coupled pathway

6:05makes me think of is kind of like how Crisper like was a platform for lack of a better term that had multiple use cases or functions that you could use it with. And so there's a kind of a similar platform level discovery happening here. It's not specific to just this. This is kind of like a Yeah, exactly. This is kind of like a proof of concept that it can be done. But the way that they did it >> is what's is what I think is like really really cool. >> Okay. Cuz here's the core challenge. Okay. Whenever you want to install let's the zanthamatin comes from some genomic pathway right there's some biochemical pathway in the octopus that creates zanthamatin okay the the standard

6:46approach is to take that gene or take that bunch of genes that all contribute to this stick that into a bacteria and then have the bacteria produce it right y >> you install a foreign gene and that's what you do >> got it >> the problem is there's a metabolic burden >> okay Because if you've got this new pathway that's taking up a lot of energy, it's taking up a lot of the ATP, a lot of the carbon atoms even, and it confers no survival advantage, the bacteria doesn't want to do it, >> right? >> Mhm. >> And kind of sounds a little bit like the AI thing happening right now. >> Yeah. Yeah. Like we [laughter] it's exactly and you know you can you can actually in terms of AI you can use an

7:27analogy where it's like the all of the energy budget and the carbon budget of an organism is very strict. Okay. It's had billions of years of evolution to figure out this carbon atom has to go there. This carbon has atom has to go there. This amount of ATP needs to be used for this and so on and so forth. Right? It's had billions of years of evolution to figure that out. And now all of a sudden you install on this electrical grid like a giant server farm [laughter] >> right? With no advantage, >> no, right? >> The the bacteria is not going to reroute all of its electricity, all of its energy to make this server farm when it when it makes no sense. Right. Right.

8:07>> In fact, if you have a bacterial population, you've got an evolutionary conflict because let's say a bunch of these bacteria are there. There's some mutation that cuts off supply to that server farm. that bacteria is going to grow faster because it's not wasting all that energy. And then in a population, it's kind of like antibiotic resistance where you've got a population that sort of >> there there's there's some bacteria that use up >> the resistance and and actually are resistant to the antibiotic and some that [clears throat] aren't, right? And those are the ones that are going to go ahead. But in this case, it's like those that have budgeted well and have cut off this useless server farm are going to grow faster and then they're going to

8:47dominate the entire population. >> That makes total sense, >> right? >> So that's the problem is like we're we're going against evolution. We're trying to engineer something, >> but there's all these cheaters around >> that are just going to do what they want to do because we're trying to use literal biology as the platform by which we generate this this organic compound. >> Yeah. like we're not using machines and a factory. It's we're literally using biology and there are these inherent properties underlying the evolutionary process of biology that are preventative factors from just being like maximize the output we care about. Yeah. >> Because it's not purely create the system is not purely >> uh controlled by like human engineering

9:29input. >> Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So, so we need to figure out a way to to make the bacteria do what we want to do, right? >> Okay. And run this server farm that like