From a young age we are taught that bacteria are these small organisms that lurk on every surface, waiting to invade our bodies and make us sick.
While it is true that a number of bacteria can lead to illness, they are also incredibly useful, and scientists are beginning to put these microbes to work.
“My lab is called the metabolic engineering laboratory, our research goal is to engineer microorganisms to produce bioactive molecules, basically pharmaceutically important molecules. We try to turn microorganisms into micro-factories, so they can produce useful stuff,” said Dr. Jixun Zhan, head of a biological engineering lab at Utah State University.
Zhan’s lab is using the bacterium E. coli to engineer pharmaceutical compounds usually found in certain plants; compounds such as resveratrol and curcumin, two antioxidants being researched for use in fighting cancer.
Zhan said for a number of reasons his lab’s method of producing these molecules using bacteria is better than the traditional method of cultivating compound-rich plants.
“The problem for plants to produce these molecules, is it takes a long time. You have to have a farm to plant the plants, it can be influenced by if the weather is good or not. A lot of things will influence plant growth and it takes months or years to grow," Zhan said. "Our idea is we try to use bacteria, so we add these genetic tools, so now the bacteria can produce these kind of compounds in only three or four days.”
Zhan also said the low turn out of these beneficial compounds when extracting from plants, also makes them extremely expensive, which limits their availability to those who desperately need them.
The process of using different organisms to build these molecules is called combinatorial biosynthesis. Zhan thinks about it like this.
“When I talk to my kids, [I tell them] I make biosynthetic Legos, like I have different pieces. So this piece is made from a plant, and this piece is made from bacteria, and this other enzyme piece is from fungi. So from different sources we combine these biosynthetic Legos together to form the desired pathway,” Zhan said.
Zhan said the plan moving forward is to continue to build his lab’s library of these bio-legos, with the end goal being more efficiently produced, and affordable, medical treatments of the not-so-distant future.