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，所有这些都通过光与物质相互作用的方式将信息传递到我们的大脑。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TikTok(TM)，创新是不断的。但有一件事没有改变--自从PerSpex商业化以来，我们可以用来管理光线的材料调色板没有经历过任何重大创新。现有的光学材料库是一个小书架。反射、折射、衍射、干涉和更多--大量的重要性质都是由几种材料的块状形状决定的。我们的研究将赋予一种新的光学材料以生命。这些材料是新的，但并不新颖，大约在100多年前就被人们梦寐以求了。它们在10年前成为实验室的稀有物品，但制造的数量一直被限制在很小的数量，不适用于现实世界的应用。工程生物学使我们有能力利用自然界提供给我们的微不足道的物质的精致原子汇编。通过对细菌进行编程，将这些成分合成成革命性的光学材料，我们可以克服制造障碍。我们的生物材料以十亿美元的价格创造，以低成本和环保的方式，结合了难以置信的小和难以置信的众多，提供了获得具有我们指定的确切光学属性的材料的途径。使用光的各种产品将从根本上受到这一技术带来的光学材料调色板的阶段性变化的影响。更小、更轻的光学组件将使手机变得更薄，无人机/微卫星变得更强大，医疗探头摄像头的侵入性更小。但这些材料也将影响非成像应用，如使用光纤的通信、使用太阳能电池板的能源发电、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看法。

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.