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Design by Evolution: Engineering Biology in the 21st Century

Efficient and wonderfully creative, biology could offer elegant solutions to problems that range from producing renewable fuels and chemicals to combating disease. To compose the DNA that codes for these functions, I work with the one proven algorithm for biological design: evolution. A powerful approach to creating useful new biological molecules, directed evolution both circumvents and underscores our profound ignorance of how sequence encodes function. By breeding them in the laboratory, we can make the proteins nature may not have cared about, but biomolecular engineers dream of. I will describe some exciting applications of this evolutionary approach to engineering the biological world.

Frances Arnold, Ph.D., is the Dickinson Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering, and Biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology, where she creates new biological molecules and organisms by forcing their evolution in the laboratory.