Slackers and superstars of the microbial workplace
Drug companies often use yeast to manufacture drugs, especially proteins such as antibodies and enzymes. It has been assumed that a batch of genetically identical yeast will secrete such drugs at uniform rates, but MIT chemical engineers have made the surprising discovery that drug productivity varies greatly among individual yeast cells.The research team, led by J. Christopher Love, assistant professor of chemical engineering, found that while a small subset of yeast is highly productive, a significant minority of the population releases nothing at all. The finding, reported in the journal Biotechnology and Bioengineering, could give drug companies new targets to maximize yeast productivity. “This is clearly a very powerful tool for selecting cells based on their rate of synthesis, which has a number of applications, including the obvious ability to pick out high-producing cell lines,” says Barry Buckland, a former research and development executive at Merck Research Laboratories, who was...