Timing the Cell: Towards a Synthetic Bio-Clock

A bio-clock can be described as a built-in time keeping mechanism for biological systems. It would allow scientists to achieve temporal control of gene expression in living organisms, e.g. programming chasses to execute specific tasks at specific times. Implications for synthetic biology, both in industry and in the clinic, would be tremendous.

With a bio-clock, bacteria could be engineered to produce therapeutic molecules directly at the site of delivery, and at the desired time. In industry and bio-refineries, production pipelines could be streamlined and timed to match with more efficient workflows. We could even envisage microorganisms that are programmed to perform a complex series of tasks in a desired order just like computers run algorithms, thus paving the way to developments in bio-computing.

Despite many efforts, however, a bio-clock is still missing from the synthetic biology toolbox.

Here, we report how we have hijacked the natural circadian system of photosynthetic cyanobacteria to engineer a bio-clock in E. coli.