A machine that speeds up evolution is revolutionizing genome design

For those not in the know George Church and his team have been at the forefront of biochemical research and development of novel techniques for well over a decade.

This concept, like so many other techniques developed by that lab, is very impressive. The last major contribution I was on the cutting edge of (back in 2008) was the ability to predict and design proteins with totally different amino acid sequences that performed the same function biologically, which was revolutionary as it showed not only that you can replace almost every amino acid in a protein with a different residue and be biologically equivalent. It also proved that it was not the actual amino acid sequence that performed the function but the type of residue (hydrophobic, hydrophillic, acidic, basic, large or small). Of course, you can't overcome a well placed disulphide bond but the ability to do this basically nullified any possibility that a company or organisation could patent a particular protein, as you could simply replace almost the entire sequence of that protein and still have the same functionality.

I'm sure I have missed numerous other advances over the past 7 years as well.

Some cool stuff coming out of that lab.

Edit: it looks like this was from 2009 so not as cutting edge as I thought

Is glowingplant.com using something like this "MAGE" device?

They seem to be doing well at improving luminosity through directed evolution, as can be seen in the graph in the December [1] update. According to their last update[2], they've increased the automation since then.

[1] http://blog.glowingplant.com/post/105558826472/happy-holiday...

[2] http://blog.glowingplant.com/post/118481662132/glowing-plant...

I wonder how the "life" this machine creates is regulated. In Eric K. Drexler's book "Engines of Creation", he warns that the rise of self-assembly and nanotechnology needs to be carefully controlled so that we don't end up disassembling the whole world into "gray goo". It seems to me that a shotgun approach to evolving organisms could be as dangerous.

Ok, the speed up is basically much quicker shuffling, but how do they test the results?)

Can someone more in the field tell me if this is exciting to them, and to what degree?