Austen Heinz, founder of Cambrian Genomics, explains how DNA printing and CRISPR genome editing can automate biological engineering. He covers software tools for genetic design, high-throughput screening, and real applications like glowing plants and engineered bamboo.
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So what I'm talking about is complete virtualization of biology. What does that even mean, right? Have an idea in your head, design it on a computer, print it out, but instead of getting one of these in the mail— you know, this is a plate filled with DNA. This currently costs $384,000, by the way. Don't worry, I got copies, so if you steal it, it's fine. Instead of getting a plate like this FedExed through the mail, you'll actually have us take your DNA, put it into a cell, our mini cells, or millions of cells, take millions, billions of video files, store that information in the cloud, and do machine vision on that, and then just give you back your data about how it performs so that you can do the next iteration. Very similar to the way people write code today. Potentially, we could also have Cambrian centers across the country where people that want to visually, physically touch and interact with the products they create prior to confirmation that they're safe would be able to come into. Like basically a Kinko's where you wear a hazmat suit. Does that make sense? It's a print that you printed out, but you need a hazmat suit to go see what you printed. And then once we determine it's safe, we send it out. The one purpose of this project is to change all life on the planet and the future of humanity. Literally humanity, i.e., changing the humans, because a lot of them suck. For engineering large plants, you probably would want to start off with a faster-growing species like bamboo so you can have faster iteration times. So you can get that glowing bamboo forest much quicker than a redwood forest, which may take orders of magnitude longer. But just using existing known fast-growing genes, just through genetic transfer or just looking at those and cutting and pasting, you could probably go a long way. But in the— like I said, the future is really about doing stuff and making— like understanding protein structures, mechanics, how they work in 3D, and actually building them and designing them kind of like the way you design 3D objects now with a 3D printer. So going back to our chickens, the idea is we basically go to like Marin County. Everybody know Marin across the— Golden Gate. We rent a chicken coop and we have thousands and thousands of these birds that we've genetically modified. So in addition to this DNA printing technology, which is just a magical box right now— I haven't gone into the details of it— there's a new technology also called CRISPR. And CRISPR is a technology that allows you to very rapidly and easily edit a genome. Why do we want to edit the genome? Because right now it's even— we can make bacterial genomes from just nothing but code. We can take code, turn it into linear letters, circularize it, and make full bacterial genomes. Mammalian and plant genomes are still too complicated to just go from nothing to, you know, full genomes. You can use things called human artificial chromosomes or plant artificial chromosomes and seed them with synthetic DNA, but making a whole human from just nothing but 4 bottles of chemicals currently is not there yet. So we're using a technology called CRISPR, which came out within the last year or so, lets you very rapidly, very easily make changes to DNA. It actually comes from the bacterial immune system. Most people don't know this, but bacteria do have immune systems. They use a short piece of DNA of something that's bad, that's not good, say like a viral segment. It's in a protein called a Cas9, and that Cas9 nucleic acid sequence will bind to some incoming DNA and cause a strand breakage so that it can't cause problems. So people have used this to cause a strand breakage, remove the part that they don't want, and insert the thing they do. So you probably do about 10 changes at a time. Afterwards, you want to sequence, make sure that you made the changes in the positions you want. Through genetic engineering, maybe we can make this process better so that we can do thousands and thousands at a time. But with our technology, you have the ability to In a single run, print every gene in the genome. You just have to use this Cas9 process 10 at a time, and maybe we can automate that as well to make it a bit faster, but that's currently the way it works. So the inspiration for this is there's already this bird in South America, and— can you guys see that? That's our dino. We just have to give it some teeth and make it grow a lot bigger, right? So already, I mean, there's some legacy features that exist in some birds of dinosaurs. We just need to more overexpress those characteristics. The time is now. We have plenty of great software. Software's actually been good enough for maybe a couple years now. We've had the ability to sequence, which is a huge breakthrough. We can sequence all living things on the planet. We have the ability, since the rise of the high-throughput drug screening industry, to screen millions of compounds. So we can use cameras and stages to look at lots and lots and lots of genetic constructs. Currently, what are those genetic constructs? Who knows how people do genetic engineering on a massive scale today? I do. Well, it's, it's basically monkeys trying to write Shakespeare. So think about trying to prove— improve Microsoft Windows by scrambling ones and zeros, hoping that you improve the way it functions. That's the way people do things today. They make random changes to DNA and just introduce errors and hope that some of those Are useful, just the way evolution works now. It's even called directed evolution. The problem is that that's not a very fast way. Before you even run any experiment, you know that 99.99999999% won't be any better, and that maybe the few, the tiny few that are better are only marginally better and can't have a huge leap. Or a huge change from what's existing, right? That sort of process might be useful once you've gotten pretty close to what you want, but you can't go from something that smells like cinnamon to something that smells like bananas just by making random changes. You gotta kinda know what you're doing. So the software— I don't know if this is big enough to see— But, you know, there's some technical terms for it called abstraction, but all it is is you're starting with ATCG, and nature reads this really well. You know, it's like at-ta-ka-ka-ta-ta-ka-ta-ta. We can't say it, but they, I mean, apparently these organisms understand that. But instead of working on that level, which is not so easy, it's kind of like working, doing computer science in ones and zeros. People haven't done computer science in ones and zeros in 50 years. They moved to, like, Java and other higher-level programming languages, which are just a step away from that source code. So this is a program called Genome Compiler. Any of you guys can use it because it's basically taking, you know, a step up. You have a DNA code, but then it's putting, you know, visually, okay, this, this is a gene, this is a ribosome binding site, this is a promoter, this is a terminator. That's basically what I just described right there. That's one expression system. That'll give you production of one protein. So it lets you drag and drop these genetic elements, and it's really not difficult. Like, I've had 5-year-olds use this program. It's free. You can download it today. And I think it— there's— we've loaded some of the downloads with the glowing plant operon, so you can actually see the source code yourself and And fiddle around with it.
