In delivering breakthroughs in precision medicine, boosting food security, tackling climate change and putting momentum behind the UN SDGs, the biotechnology industry is transforming our world.
“Biotechnology is able to significantly address unmet medical needs, enable smarter, more efficient use of natural resources, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve the quantity and quality of food and feed,” Joanna Dupont-Inglis, then Secretary General, EuropaBio, wrote for us at the dawn of this decade.
Fast-forward to the start of this year, and new research from the Universities of Bristol and Ghent, suggests that to build on this momentum, scientists should embrace creativity: needing only look at the mesmerising power of biology in nature for inspiration.
“Biological systems have a natural capacity for innovation that has led to the overwhelming biodiversity we see in nature today,” said Professor Michiel Stock, lead author from Ghent University. “Our own attempts to engineer biology, in contrast, lack this creativity – they are far more rigid, less imaginative, and often don’t make the best use of what biology is capable of.”
He added: “With all life around us originating from the open-ended process of evolution, wouldn’t it be awesome if we could harness some of that power for our own biological designs.”
The research team mapped out how open-endedness links to bioengineering today and explored ways of bringing it into the lab. Instead of purely focusing on progressing toward a set goal, they say that ‘algorithms used for biological design’ should also factor in ‘novelty and diversity.
“When we try to design a complex biological process, it’s often tempting to just tweak something that partially works rather than take the risk of trying something completely new,” said Dr Thomas Gorochowski, co-author and Royal Society University Research Fellow in the School of Biological Sciences at Bristol. “In this work we highlight that in these situations the best solutions often come from unexpected directions, because we don’t always fully understand how everything works. With biology, there are lots of unknowns and so we need a vast and diverse toolkit of building blocks to ensure we have the best chance of finding the solution we need.”
The study was published in Science Advances.
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