Posted on 11/25/2016 2:31:45 PM PST by BenLurkin
Engineers have exploited the tenacious nature of life by persuading it to build with silicon – the stuff of microchips.
In a breakthrough study, researchers have tweaked a bacterial protein to knit together carbon and silicon, producing the basis for compounds used in everything from drugs to TV screens.
The team claims that their enzyme is far more efficient than man-made catalysts and could reduce the cost of making the compounds and avoid using toxic material.
As silicon-carbon bonds are not known to occur naturally, they are made in the lab by chemists.
But in a first, the CalTech team has been able to tinker with proteins to do the job for them.
‘We decided to get nature to do what only chemists could do, only better,’ said Frances Arnold, a researcher at CalTech and principal investigator on the study.
The team isolated a protein found in a bacterium which bathes in the hot springs of Iceland.
Called cytochrome c, it is used by cells to share out electrons, but at low levels it was also seen to combine silicon and carbon.
By tweaking the bacterium’s genetic instructions for the protein, they were able to target an iron-containing region of the protein responsible for the silicon-carbon bonds.
The resulting protein is an enzyme able to make bonds 15 times more efficiently than the best artificial catalyst produced by chemists.
The same method has been used to produce enzymes for detergents and other common products.
The team explains that the silicon enzyme could find a number of industrial applications and would avoid the use of precious metals and toxic solvents used in synthetic methods.
By introducing the DNA for the enzyme to E.coli, they could have biofactories knitting together silicon and carbon for industrial compounds.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Say hello to SkyNet, it’s coming.
LOL
Boob tube comes to mind.
Sounds good on paper, but sooner or later one or more of these Frankenbugs are going to escape the lab and there will unintended consequences, such as bacteria that turn people into stone.
Yikes!
They first constructed humans with brains and deployed them as large scale machinery, the way we use cranes, backhoes, bulldozers,... to carry out tasks that are physically to large for themselves.
Hmmm, single cell slaves. Sounds like a slippery slope here. It’s only a matter of time before we have multi-cellular slaves.
“...bacteria that turn people into stone.”
Shades of Ice 9.
Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle”, heheh.
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