The Biotechnology Revolution
Welcome!
Whether you are a curious reader with little background in science, someone looking to get into the bioscience field, an investor looking for guidance, or even a scientist looking for reasons to keep doing what you’re doing — My goal is to help you better understand, and develop an appreciation for what goes on inside the mysterious, often underrepresented, and hardly communicated world of biotechnology.
As I was finishing up writing this article, Kurzgesagt uploaded a video about the dangers of the biotechnological revolution.
As a big fan and follower of the biotech world, I do find it very important to acknowledge that there is a dark, and very dangerous side to the possibilities that this revolution has enabled. Many scientists in this domain, including myself, find it important to discuss and implement strategies against the misuse of the power we are gaining. The main focus of my writing, for now, will be to showcase how it is that studying life is enabling us to make progress in biotechnology, but also in how biotechnology is helping us solve a variety of global-scale issues.
The Basics and Definitions
There is an apparent lack of consistency in the use of certain terms in this domain of science. So to start off, let me first clarify what some of the terms I will be using mean.
When I talk about Biotechnology, I’m not talking about medical devices, or robotic limbs, or Neuralink. Actually, before I even tell you what Biotechnology means, let me just remind you of the definition of Technology: it is the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes. In simpler terms, it is how people modify the natural world to suit their own needs. Biotechnology refers to the application of biological processes to serve human needs. It means using biology as a form of technology. Following this simple definition, every way in which we used and changed the biological world around us, is a form of biotechnology. By this standard, humans have been doing biotechnology for millennia: we’ve been selectively breeding animals to become bigger and fatter, plants to produce bigger and tastier fruits, and microbes to produce better beer. It all falls into the same idea of using different forms of life for their specific features that benefit us.
Here are a few examples of plants before humans started cultivating them.
With the development of technology, as well as the consequent dawn of Synthetic biology, Biotechnology has gained a very new meaning in the modern world. Stem cells, gene therapies, modern vaccines, and a variety of biological production facilities are now increasingly becoming a part of our world, and by the looks of it, things are only getting weirder. Synthetic biology refers to the tools and approaches that enable the modification and creation of organisms. It’s currently most widely accepted that synthetic biology involves the methods in genetic engineering that are used to achieve a variety of Biotechnological goals. There are, however, other ways of doing synthetic biology that might shift the focus of its development onwards from genetics. There is no way to know this.
Technology is increasingly enabling us to observe things on microscopic scales. And since we started observing life on the cellular and molecular level, we started realizing that a lot of the mechanisms that our cells use can be applied to doing things that we currently can’t do as efficiently, or that we can’t do at all.
Life has evolved in so many ways and into so many forms, that I think it’s safe to say that whatever aliens we might find outside our planet, they will hardly be too different from something we’ve already witnessed existing on the Earth. The point is that life is extremely diverse, and from the perspective of a molecular biologist, this diversity offers us exponentially more potential for discovering interesting molecular inventions that life evolved for its own different needs.
Apart from the more obvious applications of helping us discover cures and diagnose disease, I want to demonstrate how these discoveries have the potential to do so much more. As I write this, a new generation of synthetic biologists are seeking to make use of discoveries from studying micro-organisms, plants, and animals to advance new research tools, create organs, produce better crops, break down plastics, promote bioremediation, manufacture chemicals and offer a variety of things we still don’t know are possible, to important problems most of us are not even aware of.
The importance of studying life
To pinpoint the importance of randomly studying biology, I want to tell you about a field-defining discovery that now forms the foundation of one of the main technologies used in any biological or biomedical laboratory. It all started with Professor Alice Chien — a cell biologist who was studying microbes living in the boiling-hot thermal springs of the Yellowstone National Park.
Back in 1969, Professor Chien discovered Thermus aquaticus, a bacterium that was doing just fine living inside these hot springs. She became curious to find out how it is that these microbes are able to survive under such temperatures, and within a few years, she identified and isolated the Taq Polymerase enzyme — one of the three enzymes crucial for the process of DNA replication (seen in the third gif above).
Replication is the main process that enables organisms to survive, and a Polymerase is a crucial enzyme that enables the ‘duplication’ part of this process. Let’s dive into the process.
How the DNA is replicated
For those of you that need a refresher, the name DNA stands for Deoxyribonucleic Acid, and it basically refers to the type of chemical that the main components of the DNA, Nucleotides, are made of: a phosphate backbone, a five carbon sugar (deoxyribose), and a nitrogenous base. That’s the chemical side of things.
Now, what really matters is what the DNA means to cells. The best way I like to think of it is as if the DNA were an instruction book for the cell. Nucleotides would be the letters this book is written with. Considering there are only four different nucleotides that form the DNA; Adenine (A), Thymine (T), Cytosine ©, and Guanine (G), it’s pretty amazing to consider that almost everything that you’re built out of ultimately just comes down to different combinations of these four letters. With their ability to randomly connect side by side, as well as complement one another (A complements with T, and C complements with G), they can store and preserve huge amounts of information. This is why the DNA is the perfect molecule for your cell to use as an instruction manual.
The process of copying the DNA is called replication. It is a process crucial for cells, both for the ensured preservation of the instructions, but also as a preparation step for cell division — the process by which one cell turns into two.
During the process of DNA replication, the DNA is untwisted, the two complementary strands are split up, followed by which a protein called Primase binds to the single ‘naked’ strands and creates short sequences of complementary nucleotides on both strands. These short sequences are called primers, and it’s here that DNA polymerases latch onto and ‘extend’ the rest of the strands by binding new complementary nucleotides along (as seen below).
And that’s, in short, how genetic material is duplicated.
The revolution
The Taq Polymerase is special because it’s capable of performing its role and remaining intact at extremely high temperatures — something that no other polymerase can do. Just a few years after its discovery, a few different scientists realised that through the understanding of this process, accompanied by the ability of the DNA to naturally split up at around 95°C, a controlled reaction could be created that duplicates the DNA on the basis of changing temperatures. All you effectively need is the Taq polymerase enzyme, a few pre-made primers, free nucleotides and an oven that can heat up to 100°C.
Now for the fun part:
- Heat up the DNA solution to 95°C to let the DNA split up into separate strands.
- Bring the temperature back down, and allow the pre-made primers to bind to the regions they were designed to complement.
- DNA polymerases will bind to the primers and extend the rest of the DNA sequences until they run out of DNA to complement, free nucleotides to use, or until the temperature is brought back up to prevent the reaction from continuing.
- Depending on the factors listed above, cycle the process as much as you can to create as many copies as you like (Generally cycled about 35–45 times)
Let’s say that in your test sample, you only had a single strand of a specific DNA sequence. Just to give you an idea of the scale of things, in an average sample (around 5 μL of liquid), that one strand of DNA would be something like having a single needle in a lake ~3 times the size of the Loch Ness. If you managed to isolate this DNA on it’s own (usually done using gel electrophoresis), you would have no luck in finding it. Now, if you tried using the Taq polymerase and the aforementioned process above, and you cycled between those temperatures 40 times, you would end up with up to 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) copies of that same piece of DNA by the end. The weight of those needles stacked together would now be closer to that of the biggest cruise ship in the world.
We call this process the Polymerase Chain Reaction, also well known for its abbreviation, PCR.
PCR gained quite a bit of attention over the last few years since the covid-19 pandemic, but its true significance goes way beyond this use. To the bioscience community, PCR was a game changer.
Besides being useful for testing all kinds of infections, it enabled the detection of mutations, forensic testing, as well as genetic sequencing — especially of samples that might otherwise contain very limited amounts of DNA.
Most importantly, PCR enabled large scale cloning of the DNA. What better use for that, than to start properly messing around with genetic research?
