

Bacteria ‘factories’ churn out valuable chemicals - jrojro
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/12/bacteria-churn-out-valuable-chemicals/

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cryoshon
This has been a tactic used for over 30 years now, but of course it's gotten a
lot more sophisticated as of late.

Getting bacteria to do your dirty work is great for some stuff, necessary for
others, but is definitely not going to be the dominant method of chemical
production.

A few factors:

1\. Bacteria are typically pretty slow relative to industrial chemical
processes and their speed can vary immensely depending on a lot of variables.
This is by far the largest reason why more people don't use bacteria to
produce chemicals.

2\. Bacteria take a lot of metabolic genetic engineering to do what you want
them to do reliably, and can lose traits they are engineered for relatively
easily due to natural selection against energetically inefficient (read:
productive in this capacity) mutants.

3\. Any chemicals derived from bacteria still need to be isolated, combined,
and purified in an industrial fashion before they are actually useful.

4\. Valuable chemicals which are extremely expensive to produce with
traditional industrial methods (in particular, certain chiral molecules) can
probably be produced more cheaply with a properly engineered bacteria.

As you can see, there are a lot of drawbacks, but #4 can be a colossal
economic advantage for certain chemicals. In particular, recent FDA
regulations have mandated uniformity amongst drug-grade chemicals, meaning
that they must be purified in order to only contain one isomeric form rather
than a mix. This is important because the different isomers of the same
chemical may have different biological effects.

Isolating stereoisomers from each other is traditionally extremely expensive
and slow, but a bacteria that could reliably produce the desired isomer would
avoid this pitfall.

~~~
Retric
"This has been a tactic used for over _ed:3,000_ years now"

See fermintation.

Note: Yeast is not really the same thing as bacteria, but IMO the joke still
stands. Also, Yogurt and cheese do use bacteria so really we have been using
bacteria to convert lactose into lactic acid. Further lactic acid acts as a
natural perservitive so we really where using bacteria as chemical factory's
for ~7,500 to 10,000 years.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I was going to cite Cheese but the point is still valid. Bacteria, eating our
leftovers and making our cheese since, well forever.

