HOW SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY COULD MAKE IT POSSIBLE TO GAUGE YOUR HEALTH OR PRESENCE OF DISEASE WITH COLOR-CODED POO?

Daisy Ginsberg worked with scientists engineering e.coli strains that secrete color-coded signals -- and that's just the beginning, as designers turn their talents to Mother Nature.

Synthetic biology is all about re-engineering living organisms to make them do stuff we would find useful -- like eating oil spills or excreting superfuels. It's a tall order, but we're well on our way already. Still, a slightly easier tactic would be to just tweak the design of organisms that already exist, rather than building synthetic genomes from scratch.

Designers Daisy Ginsberg and James King and their scientist colleagues at Cambridge University did exactly that with a project called E.Chromi, which turned e.colibacteria into living, color-coded sensors that can be "programmed" to secrete an array of bright hues in the presence of certain chemicals. In the future, E.Chromi-like bugs could live in your gut and give you an early-warning signal for an oncoming illness by turning your poop blue. (Yup, they're serious.)

E. chromi from Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg on Vimeo.

The Cambridge team accomplished this feat by designing an array of standardized DNA building blocks called BioBricks. The name is no accident -- scientists and genetic engineers can "snap" these BioBricks together in simple patterns, insert them into simple microorganisms like e.coli, and turn them into tiny machines. In E.Chromi's case,

"Bacteria could be programmed to do useful things, such as indicate whether drinking water is safe by turning red if they sense a toxin."

The E.Chromi BioBricks are open-source and listed in a genetic "parts database" run by MIT.  Ginsberg tells Co.Design,

"The colour generator bricks are being used in labs around the world, integrated into other systems and circuits." 

E. chromi won the Grand Prize at the 2009 International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition and was nominated for a 2011 Brit Insurance Design of the Year Award, but Ginsberg hasn't been sitting on her laurels. She currently working as a Design Fellow at Synthetic Aesthetics, a multidisciplinary research project by the University of Edinburgh and Stanford University that joins designers with scientists to explore answers to the question: How would you redesign nature?

But nature may not play by the rules that engineers are used to, and if synthetic biology is going to yield useful, mainstream technology and products, a broader design philosophy has to be implemented, explains Ginsberg,  

"Traditional synthetic biology (if such a new discipline could even be said to have traditions), is focused on control -- about realising the work of design into a functional reality.  Synthetic biologists talk about 'design', but the exact use and meaning of this word in the context is quite fuzzy here. Do we want a version of nature that is purely about function and control, or should other forms of creative, social and cultural thinking be at play when we are redefinining the world around us?"

In that regard, even relatively simple projects like E.Chromi have an almost user-focused aspect to them in addition to the formidable engineering challenges that must be solved in order for them to function at all. Instead of just demonstrating a proof of concept that an e.coli could be induced to emit pre-programmed colors, the E.Chromi team carefully selected actual, specificcolors for the bacteria's "output" that are optimized for visual interpretation by humans.

In Ginsberg's view, this is the kind of design thinking that must be applied to synthetic biology as a whole, if it's ever going to make a big dent in solving our problems. Geniuses like Craig Venter may invent the synthetic-biology version of a computer, but it'll take product designers like Jony Ive to get us to the iMac level. And innovators like Daisy Ginsberg are leading the way.

COMMENTARY:   Synthetic biology is now being used by Amyris to produce synthetic biofuels from algae that has been engineered synthetically to produce ethanol or a fossil fuel-like by-product that can be refined into gasoline and jet fuels.

It's not too farfetched that synthetic biology could be used to detect pathogens and toxins in your body.  Color-coded poop fits is a great example, but how about color-coded blood, or color-coded sweat.  Using "helper organisms" that would change color to represent a certain pathogen or toxin, could definitely help in detecting bacterial and viral infections.

We are already using a form synthetic biology in AIDS, pregnancy, drug and alcoholic detection tests.  It would be funny to hear, "Your poop or urine is blue, you've got the flu."  This would could help doctor's to quickly diagnose pathogenic infections.  And, depending on the deepness of the color, could decide whether to ask the patient to come in for treatment or go to the hospital.

The science of synthetic biology combines biology and biology.  Synthetic biology is more than color-coded poop. Wikipedia does a great job of explaining what synthetic biology is.  

Courtesy of an article dated April 17, 2011 appearing in Fast Company Design

 

 

 

 

Comments

[virtual office malaysia]

That would really help us with our kids at home. I hope it's gonna be available in the market soon.