http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704026204575266460432676840.html

According to me the opinion of JCV for the work done is just and humble.

Regards!

Examples… I don’t have my book of industrial biochemistry with me, and a long time has passed, but if I am not mistaken typical cases are vinegar/acetic acid production, ethanol from sugar production byproducts, and yogurt production. All these bioreactors require periodic maintenance to remove and reseed the fresh strain once in a while.

If we use bacteria as biofuels, what happens when they start mutating upon replication? Won’t their capability of providing biofuel be compromised?

A little bit of compromise would probably be inevitable. Unlike with most other domestic animals and plants, we’re not going to be able to control and selection at every single generation, so as our synthetic bacteria grow up, some small proportion with mutations are bound to arise and spread and compromise the intended purpose.

But of course we never get 100% theoretical perfect processes anyways from any sort of engineering. The trick is to simply keep the efficiency high enough to be useful. That shouldn’t be insurmountable.

If we use yest cells to bake bread, what happens when they start mutating upon replication? Won’t their capability of providing dough be compromised?

One advantage with the yeast is we are exploiting a trait in the yeast that is also beneficial to the yeast themselves. To some extent evolutionary pressures will work in our favor to preserve the trait we want.

When we try to design synthetic organisms to do useful tasks for us, we’ll probably try to engineer them in that manner too. If we want them to make biofuel, for example, we won’t want to make the biochemical pathway for producing the biofuel wholly an energetic drain on the bacteria – in which case any mutations that compromise the function will be favored, and we’d have to be constantly fighting that tendency with our own artificial selection. We’d ideally want the biofuel generating pathway to also provide a benefit to the bacteria – for example by generating energy for them as the precursor is converted to the biofuel, or something like that.

Genius.