motherboard | It’s no secret that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is investing heavily in genetic engineering and synthetic biology. Whether that excites or terrifies you depends on how you feel about the military engineering totally new life forms.
If you’re in the excitement camp, however, here’s a nugget for you:
DARPA believes that it's on the way to creating organisms capable of
terraforming Mars into a planet that looks more like Earth.
The
goal of terraforming Mars would be to warm up and potentially thicken
its atmosphere by growing green, photosynthesizing plants, bacteria, and
algae on the barren Martian surface. It’s a goal that even perpetual
techno-optimists like Elon Musk think isn’t going to happen anytime soon, but it’s a goal that DARPA apparently already has its eyes on.
“For
the first time, we have the technological toolkit to transform not just
hostile places here on Earth, but to go into space not just to visit,
but to stay,” Alicia Jackson, deputy director of DARPA’s new Biological
Technologies Office said Monday at a DARPA-hosted biotech conference. As
she said this, Jackson was pointing at an artist's rendering of a
terraformed Mars.
So what’s this technological toolkit she’s talking about? For the
last year, Jackson’s lab has been working on learning how to more easily
genetically engineer organisms of all types, not just e. coli and
yeast, which are most commonly used in synthetic biology projects.
“There
are anywhere from 30 million to 30 billion organisms on this Earth. We
use two right now for engineering biology,” she said. “I want to use any
organism that has properties I want—I want to quickly map it and
quickly engineer it. If you look at genome annotation software today,
it’s not built to quickly find engineer able systems [and genes]. It’s
built to look for an esoteric and interesting thing I can publish an
academic paper on.”
DARPA and some of its research partners have
created software called DTA GView, which Jackson calls the “Google Maps
of genomes.” At the conference, she pulled up the genomes of several
organisms on the program, which immediately showed a list of known genes
and where they were located in the genome.
“This torrent of
genomic data we’re now collecting is awesome, except they sit in
databases, where they remain data, not knowledge. Very little genetic
information we have is actionable,” she said. “With this, the goal is
to, within a day, sequence and find where I can best engineer an
organism.”
The goal is to essentially pick and choose the best
genes from whatever form of life we want and to edit them into other
forms of life to create something entirely new. This will probably first
happen in bacteria and other microorganisms, but it sounds as though
the goal may to do this with more complex, multicellular organisms in
the future.
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