Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • News & Views
  • Published:

Material witness

Evolving materials

Nature Materials volume 23, page 1152 (2024)Cite this article

Chemicals and materials have been produced industrially by the fermentation of genetically modified microorganisms ever since the pioneering work of Cohen and Boyer in the 1970s to clone and express human genes for insulin in Escherichia coli1, leading to the first licensed drug made by recombinant DNA technology. The production of biopharmaceuticals is now a vast industry, in which E. coli and yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) are the main host organisms.

Instead of trying to rationally design engineered organisms using the methods of recombinant DNA technology and synthetic biology, an alternative is to evolve them towards efficient production of the desired target or phenotype via directed evolution. That approach is known to work well for generating new enzymes with non-natural functions6. Can it work for microorganisms too, thereby alleviating the engineering challenges by commandeering the power of natural selection? The method has had some previous success, for example to develop bacteria that over-produce magnetic nanoparticles7.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on SpringerLink
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

References

  1. Cohen, S. N., Chang, A. C. Y., Boyer, H. W. & Helling, R. B. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 70, 3240–3244 (1973).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  2. Chung, H., Kim, T. Y. & Lee, S. Y. Curr. Opin. Biotechnol. 23, 957–964 (2012).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  3. Singh, A., Walker, K. T., Ledesma-Amaro, R. & Ellis, T. Int. J. Mol. Sci. 21, 9185 (2020).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  4. Jones, M., Gandia, A., John, S. & Bismarck, A. Nat. Sustain. 4, 9–16 (2021).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Ro, D.-K. et al. Nature 440, 940–943 (2006).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  6. Arnold, F. H. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 57, 4143–4148 (2018).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  7. Tay, A., Murray, C. & Di Carlo, D. Adv. Funct. Mater. 27, 1703106 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Laurent, J. M. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 121, e2403585121 (2024).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  9. Lahiri, D. et al. Int. J. Mol. Sci. 22, 12984 (2021).

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  10. Ball, P. Made to Measure (Princeton Univ. Press, 1997).

  11. Ball, P. Nat. Mater. 1, 18 (2002).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Fishlock, D. The New Materials (John Murray, 1967).

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nature Materials https://www.nature.com/nmat/

    Philip Ball

Authors
  1. Philip Ball
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Philip Ball.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Ball, P. Evolving materials. Nat. Mater. 23, 1152 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-024-01983-0

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-024-01983-0

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing