A synthetic biology and green chemistry approach to the breakdown of chemical warfare agents

合成生物学领域已经成为减少我们社会对化石燃料依赖的一种优雅的方法。然而，除了利用新的可持续材料为生物过程提供燃料外，工程细菌还可以用于修复现有工业活动产生的化学废物。这种循环经济方法将废物作为现代生物经济的原料，而不是最终产品。化学战剂是一类特别具有挑战性的“废物”，因为它们是剧毒的、非天然的和人造的；大自然还没有进化出利用它们来支持细胞功能的机制。为了克服这些限制，这个多学科项目将把进化技术与生物相容性化学结合起来，在细菌中创造新的途径，利用含硫和含磷的化学物质作为原料，将它们分解成无害的产品。它还将从世界各地的极端栖息地（如深海喷口和酸性湖泊）中筛选大约200种新分离的微生物，以寻找新的酶，作为合成生物学的新工具。

The field of synthetic biology has emerged as an elegant approach to diminishing our society's reliance on fossil fuels. However, in addition to utilising new sustainable materials to fuel biological processes, engineered bacteria can also be used to remediate chemical waste generated from existing industrial activities. This circular economy approach uses waste as a feedstock, rather than an end-product, for the modern bio-economy.Chemical warfare agents are a particularly challenging category of 'waste' as they are highly toxic, non-natural and man-made; Nature has not evolved mechanisms to utilise them to support cellular function. To overcome these limitations, this multidisciplinary project will combine evolution techniques with biocompatible chemistry to create new pathways in bacteria to utilise sulfur- and phosphorus-containing chemicals as a feedstock, breaking them down to non-hazardous products. It will also screen >200 newly-isolated microorganisms from extreme habitats around the world, such as deep-sea vents and acid lakes, for new enzymes to be used as new tools in synthetic biology.