Week 1 HW: Final Project Ideas

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HTBAA Homework #1 Due: Tuesday September 22, by 2:30p ET

What do you want to make? Why? → I got thinking about multiple ideas and problems that i have been facing currently and thought of the following ideas:

  1. Manufacture stress diminishing cells and cells that measure out a read on them. Everyone around me growing up and even right now has been advised to take less stress. But for humans similar to me we end up taking stress unconsiously. I believe having a measure of when stress factors are accumulated and can be diminisheed in control manner instead of taking paracetamol or ibuprofen. This would ofcousre cater to all the humans maybe even animals to study and manage stress levels.

  2. Manufacture flavors. So they can be expressed synthetically in cells or in foods that aren’t usually addictive tasting. I have been trying to eat healthy and maybe if these food tasted a certain way that would trigger/satisfy cravings for fried/oily foods like fried chicken. That is why i think if we can produce coumpounds with these unique addictive flavours to add in our healthy foods would be so good.

  3. Manufacture food that has protein increase with vitamin D, B12, iron supplemnts for absorption increase. Again the same reasoning, alongwith eating healthy the problem comes to includes all the maronutirients and vitamins while hitting protein & fibre goals. Ideally, having 1 food with everything would be amazing and life saver for lazy people like me but keepin this at a side and thinking. The main deficiences that target a huge demographic on earth being Vitamin D , iron in a protein heavy food element wld be nice for not only earthlings and also for spacelings.

    I decided to go forward with the 3 rd idea as I think it is a possible scalable and profitable business idea while leaning towards bioengineering which i would like to learn more about.

(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. 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? E.coli , Yeast have been used historically to produce vallinin , malliard flavour. Three parts of this exist in different forms : A validated methionine → volatile-sulfur-compound conversion enzyme (MGL), proven in L. lactis A validated E. coli-native enzyme (TnaA) that boosts thiol release, proven when moved into yeast Multiple validated E. coli methionine-overproduction chassis strains, as a supply of raw material To combine oily, meaty and malliard flavour profiles we would have to combine different pathways produced by 1 chassis. I am thinking combining them in one chassis but to do this , i would need to test the pathways and its production in the chassis. I also want to explore if we can introduce protein /amino acids production.

(3) How would you use automation? Describe what part of the biomanufacturing workflow you would automate and why.

Multiple steps of this project could be automated, but i plan to utilise the gingko bioworks RAC to manufacture the first set of flavourings using the engineered cells. THe cells engineering and products can be screened via computational models . (4) How much would you need to make, and how long would it take? Perform a back-of-the-envelope calculation estimating what it would take to manufacture your target at a meaningful scale. (a) How much? clearly show your calculation, including units, assumptions, and sources for important numbers. Define a scale relevant to your project and calculate approximately how much of your target product you would need to manufacture.

I want to first do smaller batch of 5 people consumption then increase it to eventual commercial production for a university to test results and then to a county. This needs to make more sense. (b) How long? Using your proposed living system and automation technology, estimate how long it would take to manufacture that amount. Consider quantities such as production rate, yield, volume, number of parallel experiments or reactors, automation throughput, or whatever parameters are most appropriate for your system. You may discover that the automation technology you would use to prototype your system is very different from what you would use to manufacture at scale. If so, describe both. Again, we are looking for a reasonable engineering estimate. Show your assumptions and calculations.

  1. What don’t you know yet? After completing your analysis, identify the 2–3 biggest technical unknowns, bottlenecks, or assumptions in your proposed biomanufacturing system. What would you need to learn, measure, or experimentally determine to know whether your idea could actually work?

I still need to figure out multiple questions and what the possible actual scale for this could be. But first and foremost would be to see if my engineered potential e.coli chassis will actually produce the addictive fastfood flavour and be able to influence cravings of humans towards healthier options .

Readings:

Asin-Garcia, E., Fawcett, J. D., Batianis, C., & Martins dos Santos, V. A. P. (2025). A snapshot of biomanufacturing and the need for enabling research infrastructure. Trends in Biotechnology, 43(5), 1000–1014. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tibtech.2024.10.014 Averesch, N. J. H., Berliner, A. J., Nangle, S. N., Zezulka, S., Vengerova, G. L., Ho, D., Casale, C. A., Lehner, B. A. E., Snyder, J. E., Clark, K. B., Dartnell, L. R., Criddle, C. S., & Arkin, A. P. (2023). Microbial biomanufacturing for space-exploration—what to take and when to make. Nature Communications, 14, 2311. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-37910-1 Karim, A. S. & Jewett, M. C. (2021). “Toward sustainable, cell-free biomanufacturing.” Current Opinion in Biotechnology 69, 136–144. DOI: 10.1016/j.copbio.2020.12.012. Petzold, C. J., & Mukhopadhyay, A. (2025). From bench to biofactory: High-throughput technologies and automated workflows to accelerate biomanufacturing. Current Opinion in Biotechnology, 94, 103320. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copbio.2025.103320 Yap, W. S., Choudhury, D., & Suntornnond, R. (2023). Towards biomanufacturing of cultured meat. Trends in Biotechnology, 41(3), 292–294. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tibtech.2023.01.014 Ye, J.-W., Lin, Y.-N., Yi, X.-Q., Yu, Z.-X., Liu, X., & Chen, G.-Q. (2023). Synthetic biology of extremophiles: A new wave of biomanufacturing. Trends in Biotechnology, 41(3), 342–357. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tibtech.2022.11.010 Zhang, Y.-H. P., Sun, J., & Ma, Y. (2017). Biomanufacturing: History and perspective. Journal of Industrial Microbiology & Biotechnology, 44, 773–784. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10295-016-1863-2 Readings Folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1wX9w_MaJ3TFwHMyPp51b2vJ4mxkUNibf?usp=sharing