Xander Wilcox

Think of it as a sort of superhero origin story for zebrafish: Getting zapped by electric eels can allow them to acquire new DNA—and new abilities. scim.ag/5eI @NewsfromScience

Do you want to know how to make the next generation synthetic biology chassis #Vibrionatriegens even more engineerable, save a boatload of cash, go home by 5 o’clock, and maybe even evolve autotrophic metabolism, take a look here: biorxiv.org/content/10.110… David Specht’s paper (with TJ Sheppard, Finn Kennedy, Sijin Li, and Greeshma Gadikota) on integrating the tfoX natural competence regulator into the genome of the ultra-fast growing microbe Vibrio natriegens, and how it enables zero-capital molecular biology is up on bioRxiv. I love this paper for at least 5 reasons: 1. First, this is a ground up piece of work. David came up with these ideas on his own, and I got to support them. 2. This could enable very low cost synthetic biology. The more we can reduce our operating costs, the less time we have to spend raising cash, which leaves us with more time to think deeply, and do high-risk, high- reward science. I can’t stress how important I think this is. 3. Speed and prevention of burnout. Vibrio natriegens is incredibly fast growing, which means that it forms colonies inside of a 9 to 5 workday. I view this as insanely important for preventing burnout of students. Again, it creates time to think creatively and do important risky things rather than baby-sitting bacteria. You’ll see the results of this in an upcoming paper from Sean Medin. 4. Finally, it could let us take full advantage of extracellular electron uptake (EEU) for electromicrobial production (EMP; basically microbes that directly eat electricity and make stuff from CO2). In 2020 we predicted that the upper limit efficiency of EEU based EMP could far exceed that of photosynthesis (we’ve since built on those predictions), and in 2021 we published the discovery of the genes that code for the EEU pathway in Shewanella oneidensis. But, there is no microbe that is highly engineerable that contains EEU and CO2-fixation. But, thanks to recent discoveries by @electromicRowe, we now know that V. natriegens contains the EEU machinery. We envision using natural competence to integrate CO2 fixation into V. natriegens, and swapping out the native EEU machinery for systems from other electroactive organisms. 5. Finally, how this was funded! This was supported by a Cornell Energy Systems Institute postdoc to David (co-advised by Greeshma), by ARPA-E OPEN award, and by a very fast @AtkinsonCenter 2030 Project Fast Grant, and by a gift from Mary Fernando-Conrad and Tony Conrad. @CornellCALS, @CornellEng, @CSInst