Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have created a platform that can pinpoint genetic triggers that turn microbes into efficient factories for new chemicals and materials. The platform identifies specific genetic triggers for useful complex traits, supporting the design and reprogramming of microbes that exhibit targeted capabilities. Potential applications of such bacterial factories might include the breakdown and conversion of plant lignin into valuable products, or the uptake of critical minerals.
The team’s approach, which combines synthetic biology expertise, artificial intelligence, and statistical mapping techniques, enables rapid, precise reprogramming of bacteria as biotechnology tools, and builds on previous work by ORNL scientists, who adapted a technique called protoplast fusion to create the diverse microbial offspring needed for genetic mapping. “Unlike past approaches that study the effect of gaining or losing whole genes, the new approach lets us determine how small differences in the nucleotide sequence…
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