Although bioprocessing emerged and grew from a cell-based foundation, that’s not the only way to make bioproducts. In 1961, the late Nobel laureate Marshall Nirenberg, PhD, and his post-doctoral student Heinrich Matthaei, PhD, both then at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, described a cell-free method of protein synthesis. The cell-free approach, though, might benefit from being combined with two other techniques.
The first technique is microbial transformation, which is just catalyzing reactions with microorganisms, from bacteria to yeast. This process generates very pure products with an environmentally-friendly approach. The second technique is the well-known use of genetic engineering to make customized enzymes. Those two methods can be combined to yield enzyme reaction-mediated microbial transformation.
“The combination of cell-free bioprocessing technology with microbial transformation offers a new, efficient pathway for industrial production,” according to a team of scientists led by Wei Guo, PhD, of the Beijing Lu-he Hospital at Capital Medical University in China.
To get the most out of this trio of techniques, though, AI-based methods can be used to optimize the genetically-engineered protein. As Guo’s team put it: “Cell-free bioprocessing has evolved through the integration of synthetic biology principles, enhancing the efficiency of bio-machinery interfacing with synthetic environments[, and this] integration has enabled the production of bioactive compounds with improved properties.” Those compounds could perform a range of tasks, from bioremediation in a polluted environment to battling diseases in humans.
For instance, Guo’s group pointed out that, “in the production of high-value pharmaceutical intermediates and active ingredients, cell-free bioprocessing technology enables a faster and more flexible production process, while reducing raw material requirements and production costs,” and that precisely “regulating enzyme activity and reaction conditions can enhance the yield and purity of specific compounds, which is particularly important for the fine chemical and pharmaceutical industries.”
So, more than 60 years after the discovery by Nirenberg and Matthaei, cell-free approaches to the production of bioproducts could evolve beyond their expectations—all driven by a trio of techniques, with some AI further enhancing the potential.
