The University of Nottingham is to lead a team in a thoroughly ambitious task to create, what they call, a biological "operating system" that would allow researchers to easily reprogram bacterial cells, thus creating useful new life forms.
They could make a microorganism that helps clean the environment by capturing carbon from burning fossil fuels. They could engineer bacteria that chews on arsenic in water sources to clean them. In medicine, a programmed life form could improve the effectiveness of a drug.
"Currently, each time we need a cell that will perform a certain new function we have to recreate it from scratch which is a long and laborious process," says Natalio Krasnogor of the University's school of computer science. Synthetic biology research is a slow process, bogged down with trial and error.
Instead, Krasnogor explains, "We are looking at creating a cell's equivalent to a computer operating system in such a way that a given group of cells could be seamlessly re-programmed to perform any function without needing to modify its hardware."
The project is called Towards a Biological Cell Operating System (which, somehow, becomes the acronym AUdACiOuS) and is the collaboration of various computer scientists, biologists and chemists from around the globe. The team will start the work by attempting to make e.coli bacteria much more easy to program.
Synthetic biologists can already programme individual cells to complete certain tasks but scaling up to create a larger organism is a tad trickier.