Instead of going through pains of making E. coli grow 15% faster we could take advantage of massive parallelism inherent in biology. It takes overnight for a single colony to appear, but you can have 1000 colonies in exactly the same time. Instead of hoping this one colony to be correct we could figure out a clever way how to find the best/correct out of 1000 quickly and efficiently. I think there are much better chances for speeding up the whole experiment by clever design than by forcing the poor bacterium to grow a bit faster.
Many, many decades ago I had a beginning technician job in an industrial lab where I cultured Bacillus stearothermophilus (probably has a new name now) at 50 - 55C in broth. INSANE growth rate! But, sadly, I don't remember the doubling time. I just remember a two liter beaker going from less than 10 x 2 per ml to +10 x 8 ml in what seemed like "before lunch". I don't remember the doubling time. And seemingly watching the turbidity increase almost in real time.
Nothing published. We were culturing in order to get spores for bioindicators for industrial sterilization.
Good question. I think the key is this passage: "Colonies of V. natriegens appear on agar plates in as little as six hours as opposed to at least 14 hours for E. coli."
Cloning currently takes several days, in part because the cells must be grown overnight. But if you could transform cells and get colonies on the same day, that would speed things up quite a bit. Across the multiple years of a PhD, for example, faster-growing organisms could probably shave off a month or two of waiting(?)
The potential impacts on industrial production are far greater. Being able to cut the time required for a culture to reach maximum biomass in half will have a significant impact on the costs and time required for making bioproducts.
Instead of going through pains of making E. coli grow 15% faster we could take advantage of massive parallelism inherent in biology. It takes overnight for a single colony to appear, but you can have 1000 colonies in exactly the same time. Instead of hoping this one colony to be correct we could figure out a clever way how to find the best/correct out of 1000 quickly and efficiently. I think there are much better chances for speeding up the whole experiment by clever design than by forcing the poor bacterium to grow a bit faster.
Super interesting for biomanufacturing
Many, many decades ago I had a beginning technician job in an industrial lab where I cultured Bacillus stearothermophilus (probably has a new name now) at 50 - 55C in broth. INSANE growth rate! But, sadly, I don't remember the doubling time. I just remember a two liter beaker going from less than 10 x 2 per ml to +10 x 8 ml in what seemed like "before lunch". I don't remember the doubling time. And seemingly watching the turbidity increase almost in real time.
Nothing published. We were culturing in order to get spores for bioindicators for industrial sterilization.
This is a great comment. Thanks for reading. Maybe we should get some B. stearothermophilus here at our offices and measure their growth rate!
Wonderful write up on an interesting and pressing subject within biology. Keep up the good work.
Another great read. As always, high quality content coming out of Asimov Press. I can't wait for the next book to be released!
I wonder how these biophysical limits impact the overall pace of scientific research? Any thoughts on that?
Good question. I think the key is this passage: "Colonies of V. natriegens appear on agar plates in as little as six hours as opposed to at least 14 hours for E. coli."
Cloning currently takes several days, in part because the cells must be grown overnight. But if you could transform cells and get colonies on the same day, that would speed things up quite a bit. Across the multiple years of a PhD, for example, faster-growing organisms could probably shave off a month or two of waiting(?)
The potential impacts on industrial production are far greater. Being able to cut the time required for a culture to reach maximum biomass in half will have a significant impact on the costs and time required for making bioproducts.