welcome!
Today I will talk about bioengineering.
I will start with a cell.
If you look around the room.
Look at her.
(Laughter)
Everyone you see, including yourselves,
Made of cells.
However, despite hundreds of years of serious research,
We do not know exactly
How the cell works and what is manufactured.
We know it is very complex.
We have sequenced many different genomes
We made lists of different proteins,
We do not know exactly how each gene and each protein works.
We do not even have a complete list of the chemical components of the cell.
So, it makes studying and modifying biology a very difficult task.
It’s like working on a motor without schematics.
Therefore, engineers used to deal with such problems.
They divide things and bring them back together,
To reorder the parts.
Can we do something like this with a biological system?
We can and we do it.
We build small artificial cells.
They are biological reactors and have some,
But not all cell properties.
They are made of biological parts,
But designed and put in the laboratory,
So we know exactly what is inside.
Artificial life is like a life made of game pieces installation,
We can mix them and match them from elements of different organisms
To make an artificial cell with a very specific target.
Now, why do we want to do that?
We work with artificial cells
For all reasons do any research in biology.
We want to study life, to understand it better.
We want to build new biological structures.
We want to make better drugs,
We want to study the history of life in the universe,
We want to be able to one day transfer biology through space and time.
For all such applications,
Artificial cells provide certain advantages to working with living cells.
Working with cells is time consuming and expensive
And very difficult.
Synthetic cells are much cheaper and easier to operate.
Artificial cells are not live,
There are therefore no considerations of biosafety and biological containment,
Experiments with artificial cells are much faster than replicates,
Because these cells are made
You do not have to wait until you grow.
So, if any of you have made beer, cheese or bread,
You might think of those subtle microorganisms
To do things for us is really easy.
Unfortunately, this is not the case,
When what you want to do is not a natural product
Of cell metabolism.
This is actually a problem in bioengineering at the moment,
The molecules we want to make
Eventually kill the cells that I made.
But do you know something?
You can not kill something that is not alive.
We can use synthetic cells to make vehicles
This will be really difficult, if not impossible,
To make it into living cells,
Such as different medicines, even ingredients of cosmetics or perfumes.
In some way, to make artificial cells similar to the lines of the assembly of biomolecules.
Purification of the product is much easier,
Because there is nothing of this natural cell debris
Sticking to our products.
Simplicity and lack of random cell debris
Something very good to study biology too.
Synthetic cells are much less crowded than normal cells
It is made
From a very specific set of components.
So, if you want to study a particular disease
Or a particular metabolic path,
An artificial cell can only have that and nothing else,
You can try your experiment without interference
Of all other vital processes there.
So, this is really useful when you want to study drugs.
If you want to consider how a new drug interacts with a pathway,
Or what existing medication can be used
For a new mutation of disease.
Drug testing in artificial cells is much easier,
This idea of simplicity is easier to study
Can be very generalized.
Because there is a big problem in modern biology
With clone results,
The main reason
Is that there are no natural cells at all.
Even genetically identical cells
In the end can be a little different from each other,
Because of all the mutations that have accumulated during their lives.
So if you try living cells,
The signal you measure is just a approximation of the situation
For each of the cells in your tube.
On the other hand,
All synthetic cells in one experiment are similar.
There are no individual differences,
So the signal we measure is very uniform.
And again come in handy when you really want to study change,
The effect of a new drug, or the development of a disease.
With synthetic cells, the signal we measure
Is amplified by identical signals from identical cells,
So every change appears much stronger.
This is the cheapest and easiest way to study medications that allow us
To finally begin to consider the development of real applications of medicine designed for the person.
This is really exciting
Because today we give different patients with the same disease,
Most of the time, the same medication,
But people are different so the same disease
It can be slightly different for each patient,
The reason we do not develop treatments designed for people
For both the patient and his illness
Is because biomedical research costs are very high
It takes a long time,
But with synthetic cells, being cheaper and easier to operate,
You can imagine building personalized models of patient cells
And the development of pipelines for drug development.
This idea of artificial cells is easy to carry out
They are structural units,
Which also means that the information about a single building can be digitally signed.
This means
We can send complete information about making a biological system
In the form of small parts, not atoms.
So you can imagine a well equipped laboratory
Develops new drugs, testing treatments,
Then electronically sends the information
About making an artificial cell produces this drug,
Without the need for physical shipping of biological materials,
So that not only reduces the cost of personal medicine development,
But it will allow us to provide health care
To really remote locations.
Speaking of the dimension,
If we basically have a way to transfer synthetic cells
From one site to another,
You can imagine that the receiving end
Of that conversation can be entirely elsewhere.
When we go out to colonize space,
There will be a lot of small molecules and medicines that we will need.
So a support plant on the ground can be created to prepare that synthesis,
To fix and validate errors,
Then send information about making a specific artificial cell
Which produce the desired drug
To a space station or spacecraft.
If we think about space,
Another truly wonderful application for synthetic cell research
Directly related to my work in space biology
Which is funded by NASA.
With artificial cells,
We can build models
How primitive life looked,
Use the life model so to understand
What conditions a planet needs to support life.
So we are studying the origin of life on Earth
We can narrow down the list of habitable planets.
The whole point of it all
Is that we do not really know how complex cells work,
But by building simpler models of cells,
We can try to figure out how life works
And how we can modify them.
If we learn how to engineer cells,
We can someday hope to plant biological machines,
With artificial cells,
We can study the past,
The present,
And the future of life in the universe.
If we learn how to build alternative cellular structures,
We can explore alternative destinations in evolution.
Artificial cells allow us to extend the definition of life.
We can hope to make better medicines,
And delivery to patients faster,
Perhaps someday,
We will really know how our bodies work.
thank you.
(clap)
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