Frances Arnold wins 2016 Millennium Prize for directed evolution method | Hacker News Reader

Frances Arnold wins 2016 Millennium Prize for directed evolution method

caltech.edu

28 pointsNokinside6 comments

Directed evolution is, I believe, one of a select few developments like CRISPR that will define the future of bioengineering. It is the same thing to biology as engineering is to physics: the utilization of an understanding of complex systems and their laws to create things that make our lives better and more sustainable. I am ecstatic that Frances Arnold's work has been recognized and I think that in the future many Nobel Prizes will be awarded for the application of directed evolution or its development as a method.

For example, there is an archaebacteria (the exact name of which escapes me at this moment) that is critical for providing bioavailable nitrogen on very young volcanic islands. It is unique because no other organism in the tree of life is capable of nitrogen fixation in the presence of oxygen, requiring expensive mitochondria-like adaptations like quasi-organelles to do so. This is why most plants leave it to soil bacteria, because they can not support the process without huge expenditures of energy that would cripple their survival. This is one of the primary problems with agriculture since you need to flood the providers with nitrogen in the form of fertilizer in order to support the density of modern farming.

There are at least half a dozen research groups trying to force this archaebacteria to evolve to a point where it can carry out nitrogen fixation in the presence of oxygen while doing it at a much lower temperature than it evolved for, which is roughly 100° C. If any of them succeed, we will entirely replace synthetic nitrogen sources in fertilizer with a bacteria that can provide the nitrogen from the atmosohere, eliminating some of the worst environmental impacts of agriculture.

Directed evolution has a very bright future.

That kind of bacteria sounds like something that would spread very quickly in unleashed in the wild. I wonder what the outcome would be.

It's impossible to really predict what that would look like but we'd have decades of research to work with before this became commercially available. Ideally you would engineer the organism to require a synthetic marker to reproduce that was tightly regulated and available only in the fertilizer so that it is incapable of spreading beyond runoff.

However, we're talking about a hyperthermophilic bacteria that wouldn't be able to out compete it's neighbors at temperatures anywhere near ambient. Realistically, the direct evolution experiment will likely require several genetic transfers of the chemical pathway to organisms better adapted to the environment so we won't be effecting survivability as much. Directing the evolution of a single feature is much more practical than the whole organism so I don't think we will be tipping the scales too much.

1) I'm a huge fan of Frances Arnold - in particular I love her admonition that "you get what you select for" when you do selections (vs screening)

2) The press release is scant on details. Is this prize for doing work in directed evolution in general? Or some specific techinque that Arnold created? Or sort of a "lifetime achievement".

Life time achiement. Tim Bernes-Lee has received the same prize.

Well deserved. The synthetic biology and metabolic engineering communities are booming these days and Prof. Arnold helped popularize some important ideas in directed evolution.

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