In The Future, Bacteria Will Produce Everything
Manipulation of bacterial genomes can result in some pretty remarkable things. Even in my basic microbiology and biochemistry courses, we used bacterial proteins and viral vectors to do all sorts of cool stuff.
The classic example of making bacteria produce proteins we want is green fluorescent protein, naturally occurring in jellyfish. If you've ever seen pictures of petri dishes with glowing Christmas trees or some scientist's name written out in bacteria, that was probably GFP. Making things glow is useful as a marker during research, but scientists have had all sorts of fun making fish and other animals glow in the dark. There's this fun article about making bioluminescent trees for use as artificial lighting. Hello, sci fi setting!
But I digress. Bacteria are the star of the show here. GFP is one possibility, but bacteria can do freaking anything. If I remember my undergraduate classes correctly, you insert pieces of genetic material, often by infecting the bacteria with an engineered virus. The bacteria then reads those genes and produces the protein you want.
Bacteria have been used to produce plastics and renewable biofuels (more links here), medical products like insulin and other pharmaceuticals, and pest control in crops. I also just learned about bacteria with a "self-destruct switch" in trials for use in treating tumors. These are real-life applications either already in use, or currently in development.
Imagine what they could do in fiction! They could produce medicines, food, construction materials, biological computer components, household chemicals, explosives, and anything else you can think of. We're already on our way to using bacteria as our workhorses--take that idea and run with it, and whole cultures could develop around it!
The classic example of making bacteria produce proteins we want is green fluorescent protein, naturally occurring in jellyfish. If you've ever seen pictures of petri dishes with glowing Christmas trees or some scientist's name written out in bacteria, that was probably GFP. Making things glow is useful as a marker during research, but scientists have had all sorts of fun making fish and other animals glow in the dark. There's this fun article about making bioluminescent trees for use as artificial lighting. Hello, sci fi setting!
But I digress. Bacteria are the star of the show here. GFP is one possibility, but bacteria can do freaking anything. If I remember my undergraduate classes correctly, you insert pieces of genetic material, often by infecting the bacteria with an engineered virus. The bacteria then reads those genes and produces the protein you want.
Bacteria have been used to produce plastics and renewable biofuels (more links here), medical products like insulin and other pharmaceuticals, and pest control in crops. I also just learned about bacteria with a "self-destruct switch" in trials for use in treating tumors. These are real-life applications either already in use, or currently in development.
Imagine what they could do in fiction! They could produce medicines, food, construction materials, biological computer components, household chemicals, explosives, and anything else you can think of. We're already on our way to using bacteria as our workhorses--take that idea and run with it, and whole cultures could develop around it!
I've seen the bioluminescent tree article before. That would be awesome. Its much the same with algae and yeast, I use several products in my lab. Playing with genetics is already happening, so you can just imagine how rampant it will be in the future. Some innovations will be great, and others will have the potential to start epidemics.
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