MTS31 - Frances Arnold - Engineering Microbes
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Dr. Frances Arnold is a professor of Chemical Engineering and Biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology (most of us know it as Caltech).\\xa0 Dr. Arnold\\u2019s research focuses on evolutionary design of biological systems, an approach she is currently applying to engineer cellulases and cellulolytic enzymes for manufacturing biofuels.
\\n\\xa0This country\\u2019s energy security can look pretty bleak when you think about it: the need to address global warming, strife in oil-rich nations, and depletion of fossil fuels combine to paint an uncertain future, and although ethanol has a lot of friends in Iowa and D.C., ethanol isn\\u2019t going to end our energy woes.\\xa0 In the future, our energy supply will probably be cobbled together from a number of different fuels and sources. \\xa0
Dr. Arnold is interested in engineering microbes that can grant us a biofuel that packs more of a caloric punch than ethanol.\\xa0 She likes isobutanol, which can be converted into a fuel that\\u2019s more like the hydrocarbons we currently put into our fuel tanks.\\xa0 To develop proteins that make the comounds she wants the way she wants, Arnold and her team take a gene that needs tweaking to do the job, introduce directed mutations into it, and select the mutant proteins that do the job best. \\xa0
In this interview, I talked with Dr. Arnold about how she got into alternative energy during the Carter administration (and got out again during the Reagan administration), what she sees in the P450 enzyme, and how she explains her work to people outside her field.