Inexpensive microbe could speed biological discovery

Researchers at Cornell University have created a new version of a microbe to economically compete with E. coli, a bacteria commonly used as a research tool due to its ability to synthesize proteins, to conduct scalable and synthetic biological experiments. inexpensive.

As an inexpensive multiplier – much like having a photocopier in a test tube – the Vibrio natriegens bacteria could help labs test protein variants for the creation of pharmaceuticals, synthetic fuels and sustainable compounds that fight weeds or pests. The microbe can operate efficiently without expensive incubators, shakers or freezers and can be engineered in a matter of hours.

The research was published February 13 in Nexus PNAS.

“It’s really easy to produce,” said lead author David Specht, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Buz Barstow, an assistant professor of biological and environmental engineering.

To study proteins to create medical cures or make fuels, researchers use a plasmid (a small piece of DNA) that acts as an instruction manual for making the molecular machine – a protein – of interest. Currently, when researchers place a plasmid into E. coli, they can make many copies to test for multiple variants.

The cells of E. coli help molecular biologists multiply and manipulate plasmids for protein engineering, but the process is expensive because they often buy the bacteria from manufacturers, must keep them cold, and maintain rooms containing expensive equipment to maintain them . A modified E. coli used for this purpose is also very fragile.

“As scientists, we often don’t know precisely what these regulatory or molecular sequences should be to achieve our goals,” Barstow said. “So we need to test many variants, and Vibrio natriegens allows researchers to scale up this testing process.”

The V. natriegens microbe is not complicated, Specht said. “It’s so simple to do that someone with limited resources, like high school labs, home inventors or bio-business start-ups, can do it,” he said .

Researcher Timothy Sheppard compared V. natriegens’ simplicity in conducting synthetic and molecular experiments to using a simple writing instrument hundreds of years old. “We have found the natural pencil for cloning and synthetic biology,” he said.

The process is inexpensive with V. natriegens because it requires no equipment purchases and can operate at room temperature. Cells produced from V. natriegens grow quickly: according to the article, transformation started at 9 a.m. results in colonies visible at 5 p.m., each filled with masses of protein.

“The microbe is a radically simple solution to a difficult problem,” Barstow said.