Frances Arnold Turns Microbes into Living Factories

Using a standard lab trick such as polymerase chain reaction, you randomly mutate the gene that encodes the protein. You consciously treat proteins and their carrier microbes exactly as people unconsciously treat disease microbes when blasting them willy-nilly with antibiotics: You encourage the microbes to rise to the challenge, adapt, survive. All it took were a few mutational tweaks to a bacterial protein called cytochrome c.

“We showed for the first time that living organisms can use their own machinery to bring carbon and silicon together to form a bond,” said Jennifer Kan, a postdoctoral scholar in Dr. Arnold’s lab who performed the experiments.

Source: www.nytimes.com