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Aug 20, 2009 | 2
Microbes can be resistant to genetic engineering. There's simply not enough DNA in some of them to permit significant alteration. But by building a bacterial genome inside yeast—a more complex and information-rich eukaryote that is one of mankind's oldest genetic engineering projects—scientists have successfully created new, synthetic bacterial strains, according to a paper published today in Science.
Carole Lartigue and colleagues at the J. Craig Venter Institute have been seeking to build living cells from scratch. The ultimate goal is to produce man-made microbes to solve man-made problems, whether eating up carbon dioxide or making the fuels of the future.
Feb 9, 2009 | 9
If you follow biotechnology at all, you probably know that there is red biotech for medical applications (example: using bacteria to produce drugs); white biotech for industrial applications (example: using microbes instead of chemicals); and green biotech for agriculture (example: using genetically modified crops.)
So it was only a matter of time before someone came up with a term for using biotechnology to come up with new fuel sources. "Black biotech" is the phrase Richard Gallagher at The Scientist has coined to describe the rush going on in the life sciences to enlist microbes in a bid to prolong the age of oil in the latest issue. But it really comes down to figuring out what's up down in those subsurface oil formations.
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