Keynote: Pam Silver, Harvard
University - Designing Biology for a Healthy World
Pamela Silver, scientist, chair of SEED 2015 and the
namesake of a famous Israeli artist, gave an inspiring and exciting talk on how
to apply synthetic biology to solve real world problems. She started off by
telling how bacteria have become the candidate chassis for synthetic biologists
to program new microbes to do their bidding. Essentially they sense something
in their environment (as input), which elicits a response from them as output.
These I/O blackboxes, as described by her, can be used for a wide range of applications,
one of them being sensing.
So can we build cells that would interface with the
environment – particularly the gut of mammals - such that they report back to
us about what they were confronted with inside? Pam Silver’s lab has
successfully demonstrated that “memory” can be built inside bacteria by
creating stable on and off states in response to specific target chemicals that
might be unwanted in the human guts. After taking care that this newly
engineered microbe didn’t cause an antibiotic reaction in the host or attack
the host cells, they selected lambda bacteriophage as the candidate carrier for
the switch into bacteria which were subsequently introduced to cell cultures
and mice. In both case, bacteria “remembered” they were exposed to certain
antibiotics even after four generations in an antibiotic-free environment.
In the second part of her talk, Pam Silver shifted gears to
circadian clocks. Bacteria have natural oscillators within them, albeit not
24-hour clocks. Synthetically, however, building bacteria that are tuned to our
clocks would have huge therapeutic benefits in the controlled and timely
release of drugs in not only humans (which is not likely to occur in the next
15 years) but in cattle and poultry as well. A lot of diseases are correlated
to our body clocks – we feel certain symptoms more at certain times of the day
than other. So impacting the administration of such drugs would increase their
effectiveness.
To program 24-hour circadian rhythms in otherwise
differently tuned bacteria, the group extracted cyanobacteria’s
clock-associated proteins (KiaA, KiaB, KiaC), “plugged” them into E coli and
observed a beautiful adoption of the bacteria to the new clock. This was
amazing to see for a lot of reasons with respect to compatibility of the
proteins in the new microbial system.
In the end Pam Silver gave us a peek into the season’s
latest sustainable and solar harvesting fashion wear that is made of cool-looking
plastic tubes full of cyanobacteria. These outfits can harvest sunlight and
produce energy through the photosynthetic microbes growing inside them.
Hopefully this will be at your nearest Old Navy in a few years!
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