21ENGBIO: Engineering Biology to Scale-Up Biomanufacturing of Novel Optical Materials

人类是视觉动物。我们感知，我们学习，我们记忆，所有这些都是通过光与物质相互作用的方式将信息传递给我们的大脑。我们许多最伟大的技术进步，推动了最深刻的社会变革，都是由我们产生和记录光的方式引发的；从灯泡到led，从摄影胶片到抖音，创新是不断的。但有一件事没有改变——自有机玻璃商业化以来，我们用来管理光线的材料的调色板没有经历过任何重大的创新……现有的光学资料馆是一个小书架。反射、折射、衍射、干涉等等——一系列重要的特性都是由少数几种材料形成的块状决定的。我们的研究将使一类新的光学材料成为现实。这些材料虽新但并不新奇，人们在100多年前就首次想到了它们。它们在10年前就成为实验室的珍品，但制造仅限于微小数量，对实际应用没有用处。工程生物学使我们有能力利用自然界在我们周围提供的微不足道的物质的精细原子编译。通过编程细菌来合成这些革命性光学材料的成分，我们可以克服制造障碍。我们的生物制造材料耗资数十亿美元，成本低，而且对环境友好。我们的生物制造材料结合了不可思议的小和不可思议的多，提供了具有我们指定的精确光学特性的材料。许多使用光的产品将从根本上受到这项技术所带来的光学材料调色板的变化的影响。更小、更轻的光学元件将使手机变得更薄，无人机/微型卫星变得更强大，医疗探针相机的侵入性更小。但这些材料也将影响非成像应用，如光纤通信、太阳能电池板发电、监测环境变化的传感器等。这些材料将改变我们看待世界的方式和世界的样子。

Humankind is visual animal. We perceive, we learn, we remember, all mediated by the way light interacts with matter to transmit information to our brains. Many of our greatest technological advances, driving the most profound societal changes, have been sparked by the way we generate and record light; from light bulbs to LEDs, from photographic film to Tiktok (TM), innovation is constant.But one thing hasn't changed - the palette of materials which we can use to manage light has not experienced any significant innovation since the commercialisation of Perspex... the available optical materials library is a small bookshelf. Reflection, refraction, diffraction, interference, and many more - a huge array of vital properties all dictated by the shaping of lumps from a few types of material.Our research will bring to life a new class of optical materials. New but not novel, these materials were first dreamt about over 100 years ago. They became lab curiosities 10 years ago but fabrication has been limited to tiny quantities not useful for real-world application. Engineering Biology has given us the ability to harness the exquisite atomistic compilation of matter that nature delivers trivially all around us. By programming bacteria to synthesise the components of these to revolutionary optical materials we can overcome the manufacturing barrier. Created by the billion, at low cost, and in an environmentally friendly manner, our bio-built materials combine the impossibly small and the infeasibly multitudinous, delivering access to materials possessing the exact optical properties we specify.A great variety of products that use light will be fundamentally impacted by this step-change in the optical materials palette enabled by this technology. Smaller, lighter optical components will allow phones to become thinner, drones/microsatellites to become more capable, and medical probe cameras to be less intrusive. But these materials will also impact non-imaging applications such as in communication using fibre optics, in energy generation using solar panels, in sensors monitoring environmental change and so on. These materials will change the way we look at the world and the way the world looks.