60秒学美语：Making Evolution Make Microbes Make Products

学更多地道英语口语，关注公众微信【英语】微信号：yingyu9 ，如果想系统学习提高英语口语能力，报名吉米老师听力口语特训班，百度传课网chuanke.com 搜索：听力口语特训班，看到第一个即可报名，365个同学报名啦，100%好评哦！ Making Evolution Make Microbes Make Products 【科学60秒】 生物工程菌加速进化后的商业优势 Genetically engineered bacteria already produce some products of commercial interest or biomedical importance, such as insulin. And coaxing the organisms to do so can be done with a cleaner setup and produce fewer environmentally problematic byproducts than other production methods. But the bacterial approach has stayed limited to just a few products, due to inefficiencies. 遗传改造过的细菌已经用作生产一些有市场或者有生物医学用途的产品，比如说胰岛素。而诱导有机生命体做这些事情，我们就可以比用其它生产方法更清洁的开始生产并且制造更少的有环境污染问题的副产品。但是用基因工程菌这种生产方法现在只能生产有限的几种产品，因为这种方法的生产效率并不是很高。 Now a research team at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering says they’ve developed a system to get microbes to produce chemicals dramatically faster and more efficiently. The technique uses Darwinian principles over multiple iterations, what they call rounds of evolution. The study is in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [Srivatsan Raman et al, Evolution-guided optimization of biosynthetic pathways] 现在，哈佛大学怀斯生物生产工程研究所的一个研究小组表示，他们已经开发出一个系统可以让微生物在制造化学物质的时候速度和效率都能飞速提高。该技术采用达尔文派关于多次重复的理论，他们称之为进化轮回。该研究已经发表在《国家科学研究进展》杂志上。 The researchers induced mutations in specific genes related to the expression of the desired molecule. They then tweaked the bacteria so that genes for antibiotic resistance only become active when the cells make some of the sought-after product. With antibiotics present, cells die that do not produce enough of the product. Because those cells also do not have the life-saving resistance to the antibiotics. The surviving cells, however, show promise. 这些研究人员们对相关感兴趣的分子特异性基因进行诱导突变。然后调整细菌状态以便这些含有某些抗性的基因只在细胞制造某些我们有用的产物的时候才会被激活进行表达，如果细胞不能制造足够多的这种修改后的产物，它们就会死亡。因为这些细胞同时也不具备生存具备的某些抗性。如此这般，幸存下来的细胞，自然就是有用的那些啦。 The system takes the cells through this evolutionary cycle repeatedly, eliminating unproductive bacteria each time. 这个筛选系统使培养的细胞一次次的进入自然选择的进化循环，每次都清除掉那些无效的细菌。 The end result: microbes that synthesize the chemical of interest with 30 times the output of current bacterial compounds production systems, and up to a thousand times faster. 结果就是：那些合成我们有用的化学物质的微生物，比当前工程菌生产系统高30倍的产量，速度上更是变快1000倍。 The researchers say their program could work to efficiently produce for a wide variety of useful compounds. Which might make vats of modified bacteria tomorrow’s leaders of commercial chemical manufacturing. 研究人员们说他们的操作程序可以高效的制备具有广泛用途的化合物。这将会使整罐的遗传修饰过的工程菌成为未来商业化化学品制造中的主力军。