notes on drew endy testimony on bio tech 2025 strange competition

Natural living systems operate and manufacture materials with atomic precision on a planetary scale, powered by ~130 terawatts of energy self-harvested via photosynthesis

Biotechnology enables people to change biology. Domestication and breeding of plants and animals for food, service, and companionship began millennia ago. Gene editing, from recombinant DNA to CRISPR, is used to make medicines and foods, and is itself half-a-century old. Synthetic biology is working to routinize composition of bioengineered systems of ever-greater complexity

 https://colossal.com/  20 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/34914  19 https://2020.igem.org/Team:Stanford  18 https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2024/12/skin-bacteria-vaccine.html  17 https://www.darpa.mil/news/2024/rbc-factory  16 https://www.src.org/program/grc/semisynbio/semisynbio-consortium-roadmap/  15 https://www.scsp.ai/2023/04/scsps-platform-panel-releases-national-action-plan-for-u-s-leadership-in-biotechnology/  14 https://dnastoragealliance.org/  13 https://www.mycoworks.com/  12 https://serdp-estcp.mil/focusareas/3b64545d-6761-4084-a198-ad2103880194  11  https://zbiotics.com/  10 https://www.norfolkhealthyproduce.com/  9 https://light.bio/     8 https://web.archive.org/web/20250116082806/https:/www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/BUILDIN G-A-VIBRANT-DOMESTIC-BIOMANUFACTURING-ECOSYSTEM.pdf  7 https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/life-sciences/our-insights/the-bio-revolution-innovations-transforming-econo mies-societies-and-our-lives     6 https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/safeguarding-the-bioeconomy-finding-strategies-for-understanding-ev aluating-and-protecting-the-bioeconomy-while-sustaining-innovation-and-growth   5 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2650-9  

  4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-40199-9  

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Engineering tRNA abundances for synthetic cellular systems

• Akshay J. Maheshwari, 
• Jonathan Calles, 
• Sean K. Waterton & 
• Drew Endy 

Nature Communications volume 14, Article number: 4594 (2023) Cite this article

• 6449 Accesses

• 4 Citations

• 15 Altmetric

• Metricsdetails

Abstract

Routinizing the engineering of synthetic cells requires specifying beforehand how many of each molecule are needed. Physics-based tools for estimating desired molecular abundances in whole-cell synthetic biology are missing. Here, we use a colloidal dynamics simulator to make predictions for how tRNA abundances impact protein synthesis rates. We use rational design and direct RNA synthesis to make 21 synthetic tRNA surrogates from scratch. First principles modeling combined with bottom-up experiments can help molecular-to-cellular scale synthetic biology realize design-build-work frameworks that transcend tinker-and-test.