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Jay Keasling: Biology in the Midst of Engineering

Jay Keasling joined the chemical engineering faculty in 1992. He is currently the Director of the University of California BioSTAR Program, and he has received numerous honors, including election as Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, the AIChE Award for Chemical Engineering Excellence in Academic Teaching, and the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation.

Jay Keasling is inspired by the enormous prospects of biotechnology. "We have the potential to solve a wide variety of health and environmental problems," he said. "But we have a lot of work to do because biological systems are incredibly complicated."

Biology plays an increasingly important role in chemical engineering, noted Keasling. "We have recently put together metabolic pathways from different organisms (bacteria, yeast, plants) into a single bacterium that can synthesize a highly desirable molecule-a precursor to an antimalaria drug. By taking genes from multiple organisms and integrating them safely into a single organism, we can create cheaper ways to manufacture expensive drugs or medicines that are found in environmentally sensitive plants and corals," he noted.

The Keasling lab views the cell as a bag of catalysts. Although it is technically a chemical engineering lab, the lab looks no different than any of the biology labs on campus. "The difference is in our goals," explained Keasling. "We are looking to solve problems, not to pursue basic science. Of course when we uncover new scientific principles in the course of our research, we do actively pursue them, but it is not our purpose."

In the past, Keasling and his coworkers have worked in the field of bioremediation to help clean up the environment. "We showed that it is possible to use bacteria to clean up toxic nerve agents and accumulate heavy metals. But now we are working to build new systems that do not cause pollution in the first place," he said.

His lab is now moving toward applications that directly benefit people, including the production of cheap anti-malaria drugs or anticancer agents that are in short supply. "A lot of these syntheses are exceedingly difficult to do with chemicals. I would love to put my colleagues upstairs (the organic synthetic chemists) out of work," he said with a laugh. "Chemical synthesis in the cell is cheaper and easier to do in the long run."

In addition to solving problems, his research group stresses the evolution of design principles for organisms to increase the likelihood of success. "It is basically trial and error engineering. There is no set of rules for putting these systems together," he explained

The fields of biotechnology and bioengineering have come a long way in the fifteen years since Keasling began his research. "The tools and techniques used today were unheard of when I was starting out. Back then there was no Internet to look up publicly available information, and cloning a single gene could justify a doctoral thesis," he said with a smile. "Now there are databases online containing the sequences of multiple organisms. We can send a gene out to be sequenced overnight with the results emailed back in the morning. And even if we cannot successfully culture an organism in the lab, we can clone out almost any gene from it and investigate its properties."

"We can now study metabolic pathways at the DNA level," he continued. "When I started graduate school, we were data poor, looking for hints along the genetic highway about where to turn. Now, if anything, we are overwhelmed with data. We can study the expression of all of an organisms' genes and proteins simultaneously, looking at their interconnects. It is a lot to process and understand and then turn around and make useful."

There are bioethical concerns in the field, Keasling acknowledged. "Scientists would be short-sighted not to take them seriously and investigate the issues brought up by their research," he said. "However, it would be a shame not to explore research avenues due to some of these concerns. Instead, it is important to have measured concerns and explore them in a logical manner."

Related sites:

Jay Keasling research website