New Life Forms Created by Reprogrammable Cells

Natalio Krasnogor of the University of Nottingham’s (UK) School of Computer Science, who leads the Interdisciplinary Computing and Complex Systems Research Group, said, “We are looking at creating a cell’s equivalent to a computer operating system in such a way that a given group of cells could be seamlessly reprogrammed to perform any function without needing to modifying its hardware. We are talking about a highly ambitious goal leading to a fundamental breakthrough that will, ultimately, allow us to rapidly prototype, implement and deploy living entities that are completely new and do not appear in nature, adapting them so they perform new useful functions.”

The game-changing technology could considerably accelerate synthetic biology research and development, which has been linked to a variety of applications--from the creation of new sources of food and environmental solutions to a myriad of new medical breakthroughs such as drugs tailored to individual patients and the growth of new organs for transplant patients.

The multidisciplinary project, funded with a leadership fellowship for Prof. Krasnogor worth more than GBP 1 million from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC; Swindon, UK), involves computer scientists, biologists, and chemists from Nottingham as well as academic colleagues at other universities in Scotland, the United States, Israel, and Spain.

The project--Towards a Biological Cell Operating System (AUdACiOuS)--is attempting to go beyond systems biology, the science behind determining how living organisms work, to give scientists the power to create biologic systems. The scientists will start the work by attempting to make Escherichia coli bacteria much more easy to program.
Prof. Krasnogor added, “This EPSRC leadership fellowship will allow me to transfer my expertise in Computer Science and informatics into the wet lab. Currently, each time we need a cell that will perform a certain new function we have to recreate it from scratch, which is a long and laborious process. Most people think all we have to do to modify behavior is to modify a cell’s DNA but it’s not as simple as that--we usually find we get the wrong behavior and then we are back to square one. If we succeed with this AUdACiOuS project, in five years’ time, we will be programming bacterial cells in the computer and compiling and storing its program into these new cells so they can readily execute them. Like for a computer, we are trying to create a basic operating system for a biological cell.”

Among the most basic hurdles facing the scientists will be developing new computer models that more effectively predict the behavior of cells in the laboratory. Scientists can already program individual cells to complete certain tasks but scaling up to create a larger organism is more complicated. The creation of more sophisticated computer modeling programs and a cell that could be reprogrammed to fulfill any function without having to go back to the drawing board each time could largely remove the trial and error approach currently taken and allow synthetic biology research to take a significant leap forward.

The technology could be used in a whole range of applications where being able to modify the behavior of organisms could be advantageous. In the long term, this includes the creation of new microorganisms that could help to clean the environment for example by capturing carbon from the burning of fossil fuel or removing contaminants, e.g., arsenic from water sources. Alternatively, the effectiveness of medicine could be improved by customizing it to specific patients to take full advantage of the effect of the drugs and to reduce any harmful side effects.

The partners in the project are The University of Nottingham and The University of Edinburgh (Scotland, UK); Arizona State University (Tempe, USA), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA, USA); Michigan State University, New York University (New York, NY, USA); University of California Santa Barbara (USA); University of California, San Francisco (USA); Centro Nacional de Biotecnologia (Madrid, Spain); and the Weizmann Institute of Science (Rehovot , Israel).

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