Chemical bugs

Press, 9 February 1983, Page 23

Chemical bugs

By

JOHN F. WEBB,

London Press Service science

correspondent

Scientists hope to persuade microbes to make valuable chemicals that are at present oil-based.

Under a $300,000 AngloUnited States project, a team of 30 from the biotechnology unit at Cranfield Institute of Technology, north of London,’ will study microbiological production of aromatic chemicals for the American Genetics International company. This is a rare link-up because although United States firms are keen to invest in British biotechnology they seldom directly fund university work outside their own country. Aromatic chemicals, so named because of the arrangement of their carbon atoms, are currently used in the production of anything from drugs, dyes, and food flavourings to plastics. They face the problem, however, of being oil-based which makes them expensive and vulnerable to further price increases as oil becomes scarcer.

The Genetics International grant to Cranfield will therefore support two years work on ways of persuading microbes or bugs to make them both more efficiently and more cheaply. Processes are

being developed in many parts of the world to use bugs to feed on different substances and so convert them to new sources of food or chemicals. The Cranfield team, headed by Professor John Higgins, Britain’s first professor of biotechnology, has already acquired. important information in this field through research work carried out over the past 20 months. The team includes 16 students, most of whom are studying for their Doctor of Philosophy degrees. In its first year, the unit's contact research income was $225,000 but this year it is expected to be three times that figure. Funding for its research has come from not only Britain but from a number of other countries with the United States being the major source of overseas work.

Professor Higgins plans to set up a bioelectronics company to exploit the research the "Cranfield unit has done with a team at Oxford University. Funding for the com-

pany will come from the United Kingdom and United States, and Genetics International is expected to be linked with it.

Among the unit's projects is a glucose sensor which uses enzymes to measure the amount of glucose in the blood of diabetics. This biosensor, being developed in conjunction with a team of scientists at Oxford and London’s Guys Hospital, will give warning to a diabetic that he needs an injection of insulin. It is nearly ready for the market and will eventually be coupled to an insulin injection system so that the patient is continuously monitored and supplied with insulin automatically.

Other projects include work on bio-sensors for medical, industrial, and environmental use. The team is also working on the destruction of oil wastes by microbes as well as a project to use enzymes or microbes to generate useful currents of electricity from cheap lowgrade fuels such as methane.