Biotechnology #8 Biotech trends I'm excited about in 2021

hey everyone today I want to talk about biotech trends or researchers worth to spare time and understand their details.

I am ecstatic to see how much the piece resonated with our readers, and I couldn't pass up the chance to talk about what we can expect.

1. Biosynthesis resource utilization that has been engineered

Traditionally, metabolic engineering research has prioritized broadening the product range of engineered organisms, whether by metabolic flux management or the introduction of external synthetic pathways. The goal is to start with a genetically tractable and easy-to-feed bacterium and then change it to create substances that are useful in energy, health, commercial, or industrial settings. Ideal organisms are phototrophic, which means they have the photosynthetic apparatus to use light energy to complete chemical reactions, or they eat glucose or related carbohydrates, which are plentiful and inexpensive.

Engineering biosynthetic organisms to use unexpected sources of carbon and energy has received far less attention. However, rising CO2 emissions have prompted a new way of thinking about resource utilization in production strains: a microorganism that can assimilate CO2, or a chemical derivative of CO2 such as methanol, now has an increased supply of easily accessible substrate while also potentially helping to mitigate atmospheric CO2. As more resource consumption pathways are developed, it may become viable to make specialty compounds from any bulk chemical that is available rather than a strain-specific growth medium.

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2. CRISPR/Cas technology is used for more than only genome editing.

Trends in Biotechnology wouldn't be Trends in Biotechnology without new CRISPR applications. CRISPR/Cas tools' ability to edit genomes hardly requires an introduction at this point, and I discussed how the growing array of CRISPR proteins outside the most generally used Cas9 will eventually be beneficial for application-specific genome editing ways last year. (There haven't been many Cas14 gene-editing applications yet, but I'm confident they'll come.)

Parallel to this, new applications for CRISPR/Cas systems are being developed that go beyond their "traditional" application of genome editing. Base editing replaces single nucleobases (for example, C to T) rather than entire gene sections, and prime editing is a search-and-replace approach for writing new DNA on-site without the use of a guide nucleic acid. CRISPRi and CRISPRa are two gene-editing systems that can be used to conduct genetic tests. Using CRISPR/Cas systems as biosensors, for example, to detect the presence of pathogen DNA for diagnostic reasons, is an even more distant technological approach.

All of these creative uses take advantage of Cas proteins' capacity to identify DNA or RNA while deliberately impairing their nucleic-acid breaking activity. The protein is then modified to provide additional functionality, such as deaminase or signal transduction activity. In theory, nearly any protein function might be added to Cas, implying that CRISPR systems will likely be paired with a wide range of enzymatic activity in the future years.

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3. Cells and genomes that aren't real ( I am talking about Synthetic ones)

One of synthetic biology's main goals is to develop lifelike, self-sustaining biological systems with custom genomes that are perfectly fitted to certain activities. This is interesting in the biotechnology context both as a platform—an engineered system rooted in biology with its own design language and methods development—and for practical implementations, such as an artisanal biocatalyst, an on-demand in situ source of therapeutic proteins, or a selective surveillance agent that can detect pathogens and contaminants in food or water supply—as well as a platform—an engineered system rooted in biology with its own design language and methods development.

This developing technology seems the most like science fiction of any of the topics on this list, and I'm not forecasting that you'll be able to order a synthetic microorganism from your favorite scientific supply company this year or next. However, artificial bacterial and yeast genomes, as well as the idea of recoding genomes to employ less than the conventional set of 64 codons, have made significant progress toward that potential in the last decade. Simultaneously, researchers looked at how to make artificial cells out of a small number of biological components, such as cytoskeletal structures and nested compartments. A critical next step will be to better integrate "bottom-up" efforts to synthesis biological components from scratch with "top-down" work to reduce existing genomes to only include the functionalities that are desired.

4. Biosynthesis without the need for cells

Another emerging approach to biosynthesis is to remove as much of the biology as possible. This is an alternative to designing a whole cell to do what you want it to do (not currently feasible) or starting with an existing cell and forcing it to do something it doesn't want to do (possible, but often laborious and low-yielding). Cell-free techniques replicate the necessary components of cellular metabolism outside of cells, such as energy sources, enzymes, and cofactors, removing the competing priorities of cellular growth and maintenance, eliminating the need for transport proteins or efflux pathways, and allowing the synthesis of toxic compounds.

For several years, cell-free synthesis has been possible, but it has mostly concentrated on relatively simple chemicals, such as creating fuel compounds or fixing carbon dioxide. The ability to synthesis natural products such as cannabinoids outside of cells has advanced as metabolic engineering progresses toward more complex compounds like natural products. Given the wide range of natural compounds available and their recent success, this is likely to become a hotbed of research sooner rather than later.

5. Biomanufacturing for therapeutic purposes

Although the manufacture of therapeutic proteins and even cells is not new, recent enthusiasm in this sector is transforming lab-scale manufacturing platforms into viable disease-treatment solutions. One approach is to install platforms right at the point of medical need, which has the advantage of being able to synthesize protein drugs on demand; however, because of the complexities of understanding the activity of biosimilar therapeutics, this poses a much greater regulatory challenge than onsite small molecule production. The other approach is to build consensus among scientists, engineers, manufacturers, regulators, and distributors (to name a few) to define best practices and common quality control parameters with the goal of scaling up a finicky, unpredictable biosynthetic scheme into a large-scale industrial protocol. Given the tremendous progress in the basic science behind CAR T cells, induced pluripotent stem cells, exosomes, and other biologics at the organelle or cell size, continuous standardization efforts will be vital to translating these technologies to patient therapy.

What are your thoughts? We'd love to hear your thoughts on where you think biotechnology will go in the coming year and decade.

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