Engineering Biological Systems

Drew Endy’s introduction to biology as a Philadelphia-area high school left him with a mixed reaction. “We were told, ‘Okay, here are 200 different insects,’ and that was cool,” says Endy. “But then we were told, ‘Why don’t you memorize their names?’ which wasn’t so great.”

Though Endy’s college major was civil engineering, he also took biology. This time the lessons, on topics like genes and proteins, struck a chord: “I said, ‘Okay, this isn’t about memorizing, it’s about the nuts and bolts of these systems.’”

Impressed, Endy switched to biochemical engineering when he entered grad school at Dartmouth. But as he got involved in studies with a lifescience dimension, there was a problem: when he’d aim for certain specific results — getting a cell to grow and divide in a particular way, for example — he couldn’t always succeed.

“Nature hasn’t optimized biological systems to make them easy to understand, much less engineer,” he says. But by combining this perspective with key engineering concepts championed by Thomas Knight — an MIT senior research scientist in electrical engineering and computer science — Institute researchers have since helped impart new momentum to the emerging field known as synthetic biology.

“Our goal is to make biology easy to engineer so that many individuals can readily build useful biological systems,” explains Endy, the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Assistant Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT.

What does that mean? Take a gene that can impart a certain quality to its host organism — say, changing color when it encounters an environmental toxin. An expert genetic engineer who wants to put that gene into a type of bacteria has the specialized knowledge to do so. But an engineering-oriented approach could be to turn such a gene into an off-the-shelf part that anyone with the right equipment can use.

The tools for constructing that gene could be put online. Users could order the construction of the gene in an automated DNA synthesizer whose inputs are the natural chemicals that make up DNA. Such users could then put the gene into a pre-selected ‘chassis’ like a microbe. Unless there were unanticipated glitches in this process, the gene would perform exactly as specified.

by Richard Anthony « Previous | Next »