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Biotech

Genetically-Engineered Microbe No Longer Needs to Eat Food To Grow (sciencemag.org) 78

Posted by EditorDavid from the skipping-meals dept.
"Synthetic biologists have performed a biochemical switcheroo," reports Science magazine: They've re-engineered a bacterium that normally eats a diet of simple sugars into one that builds its cells by absorbing carbon dioxide (CO2), much like plants. The work could lead to engineered microbes that suck CO2 out of the air and turn it into medicines and other high-value compounds.

"The implications of this are profound," says Dave Savage, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved with the work. Such advances, he says, could "ultimately make us change the way we teach biochemistry...."

In all, the evolved bacteria picked up 11 new genetic mutations that allowed them to survive without eating other organisms, the team reports today in Cell. "It really shows how amazing evolution can be, in that it can change something so fundamental as cellular metabolism," Milo says.
"The bacteria were given just enough sugar so they wouldn't starve to death," explains long-time Slashdot reader Tangential, "but had access to plenty of CO2 and formate.

"The process of evolution says that life finds a way to cope with stressful conditions like these, and some of the bacteria soon turned to the CO2 as a food source."
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Genetically-Engineered Microbe No Longer Needs to Eat Food To Grow More

Genetically-Engineered Microbe No Longer Needs to Eat Food To Grow

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  • "The bacteria were given just enough sugar so they wouldn't starve to death,"

    That's amazing! I just realized I don't need food to grow either! (I just need enough to not starve to death, no big deal)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fazig ( 2909523 )
      Good luck.
      But if I remember the geomicrobiology lectures I attended for fun some years ago, those simple microorganisms are very flexible when it comes to what they can metabolize More complex organisms like animals, plants, or fungi are not because of all the inter-dependencies of their different cells.

  • The Food is Formate (Score:5, Informative)

    by careysub ( 976506 ) on Saturday November 30, 2019 @07:01PM (#59471700)

    Bad title. The e. Coli were made into autotrophs, which includes in its definition organisms that derive energy from simple compounds, but make everything else themselves - similar to chemosynthetic bacteria but using one of the simplest carbon compounds - formic acid (HCOOH) and its salts. But they do eat food, the aforementioned formate, to get energy.

    This is the only energy source they use (what we usually are thinking about when we say "food") and it makes everything else from CO2 as the carbon source, some of which came from oxidizing formate into CO2 and H2O.

    • The rising carbon levels in our atmosphere have people really worried about future temperature levels, to the point of imposing restrictive laws that have real consequences for the economy (and for people's ability to earn a living).

      Solving this problem through legal and cultural engineering has proven to be difficult, expensive, and ineffective.

      Efforts to just plant more trees are underway, but we all know that the kinds of numbers we are talking about are staggering.

      So, here we go. The scientists have ju

  • "It really shows how amazing evolution can be, in that it can change something so fundamental as cellular metabolism," Milo says.

    That is, directed evolution. In other words, design.

    • Spot the religious idiot.

  • But (Score:1)

    by meglon ( 1001833 )
    The article doesn't go into much detail about the night the first growth spurt was noticed, nor the 4 lab techs who were never seen again. #scientistsarefoodtoo

  • CO2 is bad, right? I can't see what could go wrong if we got rid of all of it.
    *spills beaker*

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fazig ( 2909523 )
      Can you think in other terms than extremes?

      • No, because, once it escape the lab, this will be result [lazonasucia.com]. Be afraid...

        • Yes, when we accidentally spill giga-tons of formate at the same time. Like anything else, this is limited by its food (energy) supply. CO2 isn't the food, formate is.

      • Can you not take everything so literally? It's like you only think in black and white.

        See what I did there?

      • Yes, extremes are indeed usuall unlikely. But it is useful to highlight them, because 1. they are also the worst cases, and 2. it lets us prepare for all the less bad cases in the process.
        This is why people do that.

        People like you, on the other hand, are massively overwhelmed with preparing their minds for such extremes, and the only thing they can do, is stick their heads in the sand, and call everyone crazy or a conspiracy theorist disturbs their protective delusion of comforting calmness and safety.

        Crazy

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by fazig ( 2909523 )
          It helps to understand some probability theory.

          For example if your chance is one in a million and you do it a million times the math for it happening 'at least once' looks like this:
          1 - (1 - (1/1,000,000)) ^1,000,000 = 0.632

          This is also why most people who understand probability theory know that the lottery is essentially a tax on those who don't understand probability theory.


          Anyway, a much bigger part is how much resources one has to expend on preparing for such an unlikely event. In the case of pl

  • It will be funny once that bacteria thrives in the wild, suffocating all the plants that need CO2.

    Reminds me of when algae and trees (I think) ruined the athmosphere by introducing that nasty corrosive gas that turns everyting into fire, called "oxygen".
    Can you say "holocene extinction event, alternate timeline edition"?

    Oh well ... the planet will survive, and if we off ourselves that way, at least we would have done something good for the planet, for once.

    • But it needs formate for energy however. formate isn't just lying around. Plants have sunlight, which is abundant.

  • If this microbe gets out of hand it could possibly suck ALL of the CO2 out of the air. Since normal plants need CO2 to live all plants would die then all other creatures would die and then the microbes themselves. CO2 is a very necessary gas.

    • ... People who didn't understand the summary. This thing eats formate, which gives it enough free energy to break down the CO2. Nothing just eats CO2.

      • The point here is that formate needs less energy to make than sugar, which is what else this e coli normally needs to live. So we can produce formate then breed these things as a cheaper way to absorb CO2 and make usable compounds.

  • They didn't engineer it. They poked it with a pointed stick until it engineered itself.

  • There's a fire, sir.

  • How do they make DNA without phosphorus?

    • You could ask the same question about the original microbes: if they just live on "simple sugars" then how do they get phosphorus? The answer is "osmosis" is how they get everything, but when we say they "eat" sugars it we don't mean munching on it, we mean that it's stuff already absorbed by the cell membrane then metabolized by enzymes. It's the enzymes actually doing the "eating" not the cell itself.

      To understand what they actually did, they took real-life microbes that mainly eat sugars, and they used s

  • Let's see now ...
    eat CO2 and produce medicines
    eat CO2 and produce gasoline
    eat CO2 and produce chocolate
    eat CO2 and produce super germs.
  • Screw those threes. Fk them, they need co2. Fk them, theyre actually greening the world because of more co2. Fk them. Take their co2. Crush them
  • It reads like something that, if escaped, could replace all the plants and trees we need to live.
  • I wonder if it would be possible to populate Venus with similar bugs? In particular, it would be useful if they could convert the CO2 to something that could be sent to the moon/mars. We will need carbon there (soil if nothing else), and plenty of it in its atmosphere.

    • I wonder if it would be possible to populate Venus with similar bugs? In particular, it would be useful if they could convert the CO2 to something that could be sent to the moon/mars. We will need carbon there (soil if nothing else), and plenty of it in its atmosphere.

      Well that all depends on how much formate there is just waiting around on Venus for them...

      "The bacteria were given just enough sugar so they wouldn't starve to death," explains long-time Slashdot reader Tangential, "but had access to plenty of CO2 and formate.

      And weather you can add in the genes to make tiny little rocket engines for them to launch themselves out of Venus's gravity and then on to our moon or Mars.
      You'd best get straight on it.

      • If you understood anything about Chemistry, let alone physics, or science, you would realize that what was the Formic Acid was used to provide the energy that sunlight used to. It is not incorporated into the chemistry, but converted into ATP, which then provides that energy. The upper atmosphere of Venus is loaded with sulphuric acid. Like formic acid, that is capable of providing the energy. In fact, here on earth, at the depths of the oceans are bugs, not only using sulphuric acid for energy, but dealing

        • I've lost count of how many times I've pointed out your lies.
          You are still yet to show even a single one of mine. That number is easy to remember, zero. Let me know when it changes.

          Don't let your hunt for lies slow down your floating Venus CO2 collecting 'lets carbon the moon' project. You have much work to do.
          I await further updates to your progress.

        • If you understood anything about Chemistry, let alone physics, or science, you would realize that what was the Formic Acid was used to provide the energy that sunlight used to.

          OK Mr chemistry physics science genius. Where did you get the silly idea that they used sunlight and not sugar before the change?

          On the energy side, the researchers couldn’t give the bacterium the ability to carry out photosynthesis, because the process is too complex. Instead, they inserted the gene for an enzyme that enabled the microbe to eat formate, one of the simplest carbon-containing compounds, and one other strains of E. coli can’t eat.

          They aren't getting the energy from sunlight but from the formate you stable genius.
          The actual research scientists couldn't get them to do it. But I'm sure you could knock something together in an afternoon. After you finished your floating Venus platform of course.

  • Engineer the most common and numerous organism on the planet that has the ability to replicate super fast to suck co2 out of the atmosphere. What could go wrong...

  • I read a story a couple of years ago about an attempt to eradicate a minor but annoying disease that was affecting crops in the U.K. The farmers and the government funded a study to find out how best to do that, in an attempt to find a natural alternative to chemical treatment. They eventually traced the source of the disease to small dust particles. The natural solution would be to take steps to minimize or eliminate the dust particles, right?

    Except they also found that those same dust particles were in

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