Designing Biology for a Healthy World

The engineering of Biology presents infinite opportunities for therapeutic design, diagnosis, prevention of disease and new sustainability strategies.  Here, I will present concepts and experiments that begin to address how we approach these problems in a systematic way. By one strategy, we engineer components of the microbiome to act as both diagnostics and therapeutics.  In one example, we have engineered natural gut bacteria to record the exposure of animals to antibiotics and inflamation and to count the number of cell divisions as the bacteria pass through the gut.  We can engineer the same bacteria to secrete toxins that could result in localized killing of pathogens and to act in a communal manner.  Taken together, these experiments have far-reaching implications for the use of biology to prevent and treat disease in the future.  Towards sustainability, we seek better ways to engineer cells to harvest sunlight and/or electricity from solar power.  We have engineered the interface between living organisms and chemistry and created the ‘bionic leaf.’  Here, we have devised a novel way to store solar energy that mimics photosynthesis at the same or better efficiency.