Week 1 HW: Final Project Ideas
HTBAA Homework #1 Scott Johnstone
(1) What you would like to biomanufacture and why?
Describe the target product or output you would like to make.
I’m actually more interested in targeting inputs than outputs.
I’m specifically interested in developing organisms that can take as their inputs various materials other parties regularly pay to dispose of — municipal recycling, industrial waste, agricultural byproducts, etc. Potentially even radioactive waste that governments are already paying enormously just to avoid having to deal with.
Don’t get me wrong though, I wouldn’t say “no” to a good output. A secondary goal could be to have the organisms also secrete useful (ideally even valuable) molecules as their outputs — H2O, Au, etc.
The most ideal case would be to take as inputs materials that A) create a potential revenue stream just by accepting them from third parties, B) are also environmentally precarious or problematic and would generally be beneficial to society if they get broken down or processed into something benign, and C) produce clean air and rare minerals as outputs.
Even if the outputs are just safe biodegradable waste, if the inputs can be materials whose disposal or stockpiling is of environmental concern, then it appears there’s both an ethical and financial incentive in targeting inputs as a primary project driver.
Why are you interested in making it?
I would very much like to become wealthy. Ideally rapidly, while there’s still a bit of civilization left in which to enjoy said wealth.
I’d also very much like to see civilization get a bit of an extension. If there could be, say, a kind of algae that would inhale greenhouse gases and exhale clean air in meaningful proportions, even if it had no business case that still seems like it’d be a worthwhile endeavour to engineer.
(2) What living system would you use?
Propose at least one living-system manufacturing chassis that could produce your target—for example, a microbial, mammalian, or cell-free system.
Whichever is best suited for this sort of application. (Don’t know enough yet about biomanufacturing to say for sure.)
It’s fun to imagine a sort of mammal that eats plastic and breathes CO2, exhales O2 and poops diamonds.
But I assume it would be a bit more realistic to envision a microbial platform that takes industrial waste as its input, and produces inert soil or industrial precursors as outputs.
At a high level, describe how the system would make your target product. What goes into the system? What biological process or processes occur? What comes out?
For this application it would be more about identifying how the system would break down the target inputs. That would depend what inputs we’re trying to break down.
Eg, if working with plastics as an input we’d likely base the chassis on a microbe like Ideonella sakaiensis, in which case we’d expect monomers as its output. We’d then try to look at ways to dispose of those monomers in an environmentally neutral way, or ways to convert them into something marketable.
Plastics are probably not a great starting point though, given their disposal cost is somewhat low relative to volume — if we can identify a high-revenue input (which is to say an input that carries a very high cost for potential clients to store or dispose of even small amounts) then we only have to engineer an organism that can turn those inputs into literally anything benign. Even if we’re just dumping the output straight into the ocean and writing off any potential revenue from it, as long as it’s environmentally neutral there’s a business case here just based on revenue from accepting the inputs.
(3) How would you use automation?
Identify at least one automation technology that you would combine with your living system.
Cloud Lab seems like the easy go-to answer for this one, even if only due to its modular nature. It seems like one could shoehorn just about any lab-related activity into a cloud lab to satisfy the automation requirement.
Based on the brief overview in Tuesday’s lecture I have a hunch we’d also want to use a microfluidics platform in order to perform DNA alterations, but I gather I’ll have a more concrete sense of that after we cover it in more detail next week.
(4) How much would you need to make, and how long would it take?
(a) How much?
Depends on the inputs.
For something like agricultural byproduct, enough to process 1kg of input materials seems like a reasonable amount to make a meaningful proof of concept, with 1 metric tonne as a meaningful demonstration at scale.
For something more along the lines of nuclear waste we might operate more in the range of 1g for proof of concept and 1kg for demonstration at scale.
(b) How long? Using your proposed living system and automation technology, estimate how long it would take to manufacture that amount.
I don’t know enough about biomanufacturing (yet) to project an estimate for this.
- What don’t you know yet?
Broadly speaking, how to biomanufacture.
Specific to this assignment, I suppose a good place to start would be to try and compose a list of potential high-revenue inputs.
We’d then need to identify what sort of organisms might be able to break down those inputs, and what sort of output targets might be realistic if said organisms can be created.
That would give us a sort of matrix showing which inputs can realistically be worked with, what their ballpark revenue potential might be for both input acceptance and output distribution, and at least a bird’s eye view of how much engineering would be required to actually manufacture the bio, so to speak (ie, to get from a starting organism to the target product).