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| 26.1.2012 | 1 month ago
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Could microbes grow the starship?
We imagine making products “not found in nature”—but even natural microbes make molecules that organic chemists would never dream of. Look at thisantitumor agent discovered from a filamentous soil bacterium, the kind of bacteria that give soil that new smell in the springtime (Science 297:1170). Those sets of three parallel lines are each triple bonds, within a nine-carbon ring. Who would even think to draw such a thing, let alone make it? To make it, the bacteria use modular enzymes, nanoscale assembly lines that condense one functional part after another. The original nanotechnology.
