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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday April 10 2018, @12:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-give-them-an-espresso dept.

Caltech scientists have created a strain of bacteria that can make small but energy-packed carbon rings that are useful starting materials for creating other chemicals and materials. These rings, which are otherwise particularly difficult to prepare, now can be "brewed" in much the same way as beer.

The bacteria were created by researchers in the lab of Frances Arnold, Caltech's Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering and Biochemistry, using directed evolution, a technique Arnold developed in the 1990s. The technique allows scientists to quickly and easily breed bacteria with the traits that they desire. It has previously been used by Arnold's lab to evolve bacteria that create carbon-silicon and carbon-boron bonds, neither of which is found among organisms in the natural world. Using this same technique, they set out to build the tiny carbon rings rarely seen in nature.

"Bacteria can now churn out these versatile, energy-rich organic structures," Arnold says. "With new lab-evolved enzymes, the microbes make precisely configured strained rings that chemists struggle to make."

In a paper published this month in the journal Science, the researchers describe how they have now coaxed Escherichia coli bacteria into creating bicyclobutanes, a group of chemicals that contain four carbon atoms arranged so they form two triangles that share a side. To visualize its shape, imagine a square piece of paper that's lightly creased along a diagonal.

[...] Unlike other carbon rings, such as cyclohexanes and cyclopentanes, bicyclobutanes are rarely found in nature. This could be due to their [inherent] instability or the lack of suitable biological machineries for their assembly. But now, Arnold and her team have shown that bacteria can be genetically reprogrammed to produce bicyclobutanes from simple commercial starting materials. As the E. coli cells go about their bacterial business, they churn out bicyclobutanes. The setup is kind of like putting sugar and letting it ferment into alcohol.

[...] The precision with which the bacterial enzymes do their work also allows the researchers to efficiently make the exact strained rings they want, with a precise configuration and in a single chiral form. Chirality is a property of molecules in which they can be "right-handed" or "left-handed," with each form being the mirror image of the other. It matters because living things are selective about which "handedness" of a molecule they use or produce. For instance, all living things exclusively use the right-handed form of the sugar ribose (the backbone of DNA), and many chiral pharmaceutical chemicals are only effective in one handedness; in the other, they can be toxic.


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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday April 10 2018, @02:10PM (2 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday April 10 2018, @02:10PM (#664942) Homepage
    Doesn't your liver create methyl groups from sugars? (and alcohol, alas. And yes, I know some experts have called sugar "poison" (at least the fructose part)
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Tuesday April 10 2018, @10:09PM (1 child)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 10 2018, @10:09PM (#665120) Journal

    Doesn't your liver create methyl groups from sugars?

    Well, yes/maybe, but the liver knows how to deal with it.

    However, methylating agents are a different kind of beast from a simple methyl group.
    See DNA methylation [wikipedia.org] and you'll get the explanation why those substances willing to get rid of their already existing methyl group will wreak havoc in your body.

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    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday April 11 2018, @04:38PM

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Wednesday April 11 2018, @04:38PM (#665425) Homepage
      Interesting, thanks, but almost a complete wooosh to me. Alas I had to give up biology at way too young an age, and I'm still trying to teach myself the basics. I've got the birds and the bees worked out, at least.
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