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Researchers making microbes that can do the dirty work

InnovatioN Economy

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February 05, 2012|By Scott Kirsner

Ginkgo BioWorks has engineered bacteria to produce fuel using electricity… (Ginkgo BioWorks )

On the edge of Boston Harbor, just a short walk from where Harpoon Brewery harnesses the power of yeast to produce tasty beverages, researchers are designing new kinds of micro-organisms that might one day scrub waste water clean, crank out fuel for our cars, or keep hospital equipment perfectly sterile. While making beer can be traced back to ancient Mesopotamia, this new field - often called synthetic biology or engineered biology - belongs to the 21st century.

With government grants, and in some cases venture capital funding, this cluster of companies is trying to “build new microbes that can do things,” in the words of Jason Kelly, a cofounder of one of the start-ups, Ginkgo BioWorks. He notes that tools for reading and writing in DNA - understanding how organisms work and custom-crafting new ones - are getting cheaper and more powerful by the month.

”In the 1980s and 1990s, it took biotech companies 10 or 15 years to develop a new biological drug,” says Christopher Pirie, cofounder of Manus Biosynthesis, an MIT spin-out. “The tools we have now are enabling the designers of new microorganisms to work at a much more accelerated pace.”

Three of the companies, including Cambrian Innovation, are neighbors in the Marine Industrial Park, a hulking collection of buildings on the harbor, originally built for Army and Navy logistics and ship repair.

Cambrian is cultivating colonies of bacteria found in nature that, when charged with electricity, can serve as “living catalysts” in a chemical reaction. “These kind of electrically active microbes were only discovered in 1999,” says chief executive Matthew Silver.

Packed together into modules, the microbes can convert carbon dioxide into methane gas - useful if you want to keep the CO2 from escaping into the atmosphere - or extract pollutants from waste water while generating electricity.

One Cambrian project, called Exogen, has received about $2 million in funding from the National Science Foundation and private investors, Silver says. It seeks to use bacteria for waste-water treatment. This is already done in places like the giant egg-shaped “digesters” on Deer Island, but Cambrian says its process would require much less energy.