Lecture 2: Designing Biology for Sustainability
One major thrust for synthetic biologists is to harness the ability natural chemical processes to create a more sustainable industry for chemicals, consumables, materials and energy. I will cover new strategies used to engineer cells to produce all of these things. Second, I will cover work on engineering cells to interface with inorganics and electronics. In particular, I will discuss the success of the Bionic Leaf whereby sunlight can be harvested and used by bacteria to produce chemicals and materials on demand.