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IBM, The NSF And UC San Francisco Combine To Power Up The Exciting World Of Cellular Engineering

This article is more than 7 years old.

Cellular engineering is poised to open up exciting avenues of exploration into ways to combat disease, enhance food production, monitor the environment for toxins and much more under the auspices of the newly announced Center for Cellular Construction at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). The Center for Cellular Construction brings together expertise in biochemistry, biophysics, cell biology, medicine, mathematics and engineering from researchers at UCSF, Stanford, San Francisco State University and UC Berkeley, advanced imaging technologies coupled with Watson's artificial intelligence from IBM Research Almaden, and funding from the National Science Foundation. The goal is "to transform the field of cell biology into a quantitative discipline and to adapt tools from engineering, the physical sciences, and computer science to design automated machines out of living cells."

It is well known that the morphology or structure of cells affects how they function. Two cells of the same type may function very differently because of the way they're built. What is not as well known are the mechanisms through which morphology directly affects function. Increasing our understanding of these mechanisms opens up the possibility of designing and engineering individual cells and multicellular structures that can produce valuable products such as biofuels or therapeutic drugs, or fulfill important functions such as monitoring the environment for toxic contaminants.

Credit: Wikipedia

The Center for Cellular Construction is organized around five interacting projects that are designed to facilitate the iterative process that characterizes sound research in both basic science and applied R&D settings. Design a model, build it, test it, refine it and repeat as necessary. 

  • The Cellular Machine Shop will develop and build cell engineering tools such as high capacity imaging systems and gene synthesis and sequencing tools.
  • Computer Aided Design (CAD) will focus on building a computational platform that gives researchers the ability to virtually model individual cells and multicellular structures. The goal is to provide cellular engineers with a tool that is similar to the CAD programs that are frequently used by engineers in the physical sciences.
  • Multicellular Engineering is devoted to creating tools at the molecular level that allow cellular engineers to combine individual cells into multicellular units that are designed to solve specific problems.
  • The Living Bioreactor project is focused on designing cells that can efficiently produce needed substances like drugs or biofuels in environments that may be unfriendly to naturally occurring cellular organisms.
  • The Cell State Inference Engine aims to develop advanced image analysis software that will enable engineered cells to serve as biosensors that can monitor the environment and act as cellular "canaries in a coal mine" that will give advance warning before toxic conditions become life or health threatening.

Where to begin

The potential for cellular engineering is so great and the range of disciplines being brought to bear in the new Center is so broad that it's hard to know where to begin. I asked the Center leadership which projects they thought they might tackle first.

Wallace Marshall, a professor of biochemistry and biophysics who is the Director of the Center, responded that one of their first projects is likely to be engineering yeast cells to produce larger quantities of methyl chloride. Why methyl chloride?

Methyl chloride is used in the production of silicone, a material that has widespread applications in many industries including electronics, automotive, healthcare, construction, manufacturing and solar. The industrial process that produces methyl chloride also produces dangerous corrosive and volatile byproducts and relies heavily on the consumption of nonrenewable energy resources like coal and natural gas.

Yeast cells can be made to produce methyl chloride in an internal structure called a vacuole. Prior research leads to the expectation that the amount of methyl chloride produced by a yeast cell is related to the size of the vacuole where it is made. The Center's project will involve engineering larger vacuoles in yeast cells in order to increase their ability to produce methyl chloride.

If the project is successful, it will demonstrate how cellular engineering can modify cells so that they function as efficient bioreactors that are capable of producing materials with commercial value. The project will also show that cellular engineering can contribute to the green chemistry movement by producing commercially viable quantities of methyl chloride without the addition of toxic and dangerous byproducts and the consumption of nonrenewable energy resources.

Zev Gartner, one of the center's co-directors and an Associate Professor of pharmaceutical chemistry, drew attention to using the self-assembling ability of cells to create products that would have immediate utility in the consumer space. He suggested the possibility of engineering biodegradable packaging materials that smell like fresh-baked bread or replacements for animal hides with materials that are grown in the lab.

Gartner also pointed out that initial work carried out with single-cell organisms like yeast cells serves as a training ground for developing tools and techniques that can be used with human cells with the goal of building healthy replacements for diseased tissues and organs.

Taking it outside the lab

Cellular engineering at the level that will be pursued in the Center for Cellular Construction is a new thing and informing and educating the general public about the research going on at the Center is viewed as an important part of the Center's mission. The Center has partnered with San Francisco's renowned Exploratorium to develop exhibits that will explore ways to realize the potentials and avoid the pitfalls of cellular engineering. Center personnel from many research labs will work with the staff at the Exploratorium in this effort.

The Center is also collaborating with UCSF's Science and Health Education Partnership to develop high-school curricula about cell engineering through a summer "Boot Camp" program for high school students and teachers in the San Francisco area. The plan is to make the curricula available nationwide after it has been developed and refined in San Francisco.

Finally, the Center plans an outreach program where they will bring hands-on demonstrations of cellular engineering to science festivals, Maker Faires, and hackathons.

Hope for the future

The organizations behind the Center for Cellular Construction are particularly well-suited to insure that the promise of the new institution is fulfilled. U.S. News gobal rankings of research universities places UCSF as the fifth best university in the world in Biology and Biochemistry. The third (UC Berkeley) and fourth (Stanford) ranked universities are also part of the Center. IBM's Watson is one of the world's leading platforms for the application of artificial intelligence to knowledge organization and retrieval and the IBM Research Almaden group which is participating in the Center has dedicated expertise in nanomedicine and medical image analytics. Finally, the NSF is providing five years of "blue sky" funding for the Center which is ideal for a research initiative that is as open-ended and rich with possibility as cellular engineering.

Whether or not the Center for Cellular Construction fulfills its early promise remains to be seen but the pieces are all in place. Five years from now we may all be experiencing the benefits if the efforts of everyone associated with the Center achieve the hoped for results.

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