Synthetic Biology Market Grows as Companies Tap into Its Innovation

A researcher from Chesterfield, Missouri, Thomas (Tom) Brutnell, PhD, has spent 25 years as a principal investigator studying genomes, genetics, and molecular biology. Dr Thomas Brutnell, the founder of Viridis Genomics Consulting, LLC, has interests in Chinese medicinal plants, plant tissue culture and transformation, and synthetic biology.

A January 2023 article in the business publication, BigThink, reported that the market for synthetic biology is poised for growth. The current global synthetic biology market was valued at $10.11 billion in 2021, with a possible growth of $32.73 billion in 2028. Further, this is based on a compounded annual growth rate of 27.1 percent between 2022 and 2028.

Synthetic biology involves redesigning or reconstructing biological entities to advance processes. The technology has been around since the early 1980s when it revolutionized insulin production by inserting a human gene into a bacterium. In essence, the technology engineers microbes as a part of biomanufacturing using enzymes, chemicals, and other bio-based materials.

Two companies are leading the way in using synthetic biology. Bayer partner, Gingko BioWorks, uses the technology to help other innovators manufacture plastic munching microbes and improve beauty products. Inscripta uses its CRISPR genome editing technology to produce chemical and bio-based products. This company’s genome technology has gone beyond simply reading DNA to writing it to accelerate biomanufacturing.

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Efficiently Introducing New Traits with Genetic Engineering

Thomas “Tom” Brutnell is an industry leader in the field of agricultural biotechnology and the president of Viridis Genomics Consulting. His professional focus centers around genome (genetic) engineering, a discipline that began in the early 1980s when a research team led by Bob Fraley successfully utilized Agrobacterium tumefaciens to manipulate plant cells with the help of recombinant DNA. This led to the development of an array of genetically engineered crops, including corn and soybeans.

Genome engineering is different from traditional plant genetics, as it involves extracting DNA from one organism and introducing it into another, resulting in an organism which has specific desired traits. In order for this process to be successful, genes must first be located, cloned and characterized in order to determine their expression, and then transformed into a crop plant’s cells. Brutnell is well-versed in this cutting-edge technology and continues to provide innovative solutions for crop improvement.

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Epigenetic Regulation as a Driver of Adaptive Plant Growth

A Missouri leader in the agricultural biotech sphere, Thomas Tom Brutnell consults and serves as vice president at Gateway Biotechnology, Inc. For his thesis research at Yale University, Thomas Brutnell undertook a molecular genetic analysis of transposable elements in plants and focused on the epigenetic regulation of the transposable maize Activator/Dissociation (Ac/Ds) elements.

Not limited to plants, epigenetic regulation of genes is a process where their activity is controlled by the structure of chromatin (a material made up of protein, RNA, and DNA). However, epigenetic regulation in plants differs in important ways from animals. With mammals, most tissue and organ formation occurs during embryonic development. By contrast, plants continuously generate new organs from meristems (self-sustaining stem cell populations), enabling growth. This exposes the plant germline to many more challenges over time that a typical mammalian system. For instance, the meristems of a 200 year old tree are experiencing CO2 concentrations today that are nearly double the levels when it germinated and the associated extreme environmental variation associated with climate change!

Plants cannot leave their environments and must cope with variable and unfavorable conditions. Epigenetic regulatory mechanisms enable metastable alterations in gene activity and influence gene expression patterns, allowing plants to survive and reproduce in diverse environments. Polyploidization is one key aspect that contributes to epigenetic regulation. It expands the plant’s sets of chromosomes, strengthening gene families and enabling functional specializations among duplicated genes.

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The Differences between Hiking and Trekking

A Yale University PhD graduate, Dr. Thomas “Tom” Brutnell is a scientist with over 25 years of experience in plant molecular biology, genetics, and genomics. He currently serves as a vice president at Gateway Biotechnology, a drug development company in St. Louis, Missouri. He also serves as a visiting scientist at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing, China. In his free time, Thomas Brutnell is an avid walker and occasional runner.

Given the extensive amount of time many of us now spend behind a computer screen, it is important to incorporate some daily standing, stretching and walking breaks into the daily work schedule. This is particularly relevant to those of us who now work from home and spend even less time walking to and from our cars into the office in the morning or routinely skip heading out to lunch for a break. Incorporating a short 10 to 15 min walk between a morning and afternoon meeting is a great way to rest your eyes, wrists and fingers from the screen and keyboard. It is also important to be intentional in standing at least every hour. Just one or two minutes of standing and walking around the living room every hour can actually benefit your metabolism and provided a break for your eyes.

In addition to taking short breaks during the day, incorporating 20 min or more of strenuous exercise two or three times a week is not only good for the body but good for the mind. A 20 min run through the woods or even on a treadmill will do more to help relieve stress if you don’t think about work and instead focus on your breathing, your posture or on the rhythm of your pace. The time spent on these activities will more than make up in productivity (and longevity!) for time lost behind the screen.

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The Significant Risks of Hearing Loss Among Musicians

woman standing watching LED light musical instrument
Photo by Spencer Imbrock on Unsplash

Thomas Brutnell is an established presence in the Missouri entrepreneurial community who consults in the agricultural biotechnology sphere and serves as the vice president of Gateway Biotechnology, Inc. With the latter firm, Thomas Brutnell is focused on combating hearing disorders through innovative, plant-based therapeutics.

One major hearing loss issue is caused by exposure to loud sounds over an extended period of time. This is particularly prevalent among those in the music business; musicians including Neil Young and Coldplay’s Chris Martin have reported developing tinnitus over the course of their careers.

As reported in an AARP article, a German study examining 7 million health insurance records from 2004 to 2008 found that musicians were four times more likely to experience noise-induced hearing loss than workers in any other profession.

The reason for this has to do with sheer volume, since musicians are subject to longer exposure of sounds over 85 decibels, a noise level that is similar to what one would experience with busy street traffic. Anything over 85 decibels is considered risky, while the pain threshold is at 125 decibels. Average music concerts are 115 decibels, or slightly below the sound of an ambulance or jackhammer. In some arenas, sound can reach 140 decibels, which exceeds levels associated with a jet engine.

Unfortunately, it does not take long for the negative effects to accumulate for musicians. 3M Occupational Health and Environmental Safety Division data points to damage occurring after only three minutes of exposure to sound at the 115 decibel level.

Teaching An Old Gut Microbe A New Trick

By Photo by Eric Erbe, digital colorization by Christopher Pooley,
both of USDA, ARS, EMU. - This image was released by the
Agricultural Research Service, the research agency
of the United States Department of Agriculture, with the ID K11077-1 (next).,
Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=958857

Dr. Thomas Brutnell, a plant geneticist and molecular biologist, engineers photosynthesis in plants and advises private and public organizations regarding plant genetics. Aside from his professional projects, Thomas Brutnell has written and contributed to a number of papers, including “Climate-smart crops with enhanced photosynthesis.”

Escherichia coli or E. coli, has been a workhorse for biology and genetics for decades. In a recent paper published in Cell (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2019.11.009), Gleizer and colleagues conducted an elegant engineering feat by endowing E. coli with the capacity to fix CO2, a major greenhouse gas, into simple sugars. By rewiring central metabolism of the bacterium to use CO2 as a carbon source and formate as a reductant , the authors then tapped evolution to drive the synthetic biology. After 200 days of directed evolution, the group was able to generate a bacterium capable of fixing CO2 via the Calvin cycle.

As climate change is perhaps our greatest social, economic and scientific challenge for the foreseeable future, this study paves the way for a promising line of research with global implications. As the authors suggest, this work could provide a framework for enhancing the production of bioproducts produced using electrochemically generated formate from CO2 and thus could result in net negative carbon emissions. This work also opens up the possibility to enhance Rubisco kinetics for bacterial and plant systems.

A Brief History of Plant Use in Medicine

Plant
Photo by vickholius nugroho on Unsplash

Thomas Brutnell, PhD, is co-founder of the agricultural biotech company Benson Hill Biosystems and consults with various major seed companies. Passionate about the use of plants in medicine, Thomas Brutnell is the vice president of Gateway Biotechnology, a company that is developing hearing loss treatments using natural, plant products.

Plants have been a rich source of remedies for humans for millennia. Evidence exists proving that ancient civilizations used plant-based products to treat diseases. The oldest record of medicinal plant usage dates back approximately 5,000 years and is a collection of about a dozen drug preparation recipes written on Sumerian clay tablets. Other records, dating back 2,600 years, are attributed to the Mesopotamians and were also written on clay tablets.

Ancient Chinese, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Egyptian civilizations also had long histories of using herbs as medicine. This knowledge was inscribed in cuneiform on clay tablets and passed from generation to generation. The Egyptians recorded their medicinal recipes on tombs and on papyrus. The Ebers Papyrus, for example, is one of the oldest of these recordings. It contains more than 600 plant-based prescription drugs and was studied by, among others, Greek medical writer Hippocrates, considered by many as the father of medicine.

Through his writings, which included more than 200 medicinal plants, Hippocrates paved the way for other European medics like Celsus (25BC – 50AD) and Dioscorides who penned the famous De Matteria Medica in 77 AD. The book contained more than 900 drugs, most of which were based from plants. The book was translated into several languages and its prescriptions used for over a millennium. Along the way, more medicinal plants were discovered and written about by European and American medical researchers.