Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

Researchers at Yachtolt have been delving into the secrets of probiotics for 90 years. Yacold also

partners with nature portfolio to advance gut microbiome science through the global grants for

gut health, an investigator-led research program. To learn more about Yachtold, visit yacolt.co.com.j

That's Y-A-K-U-L-T dot CO.JP. When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacolt.

This is Scientific American 60-second science. I'm Cynthia Graber. Got a minute?

Genetically engineered bacteria already produced some products of commercial interest or biomedical importance, such as insulin.

And coaxing the organisms to do so can be done with a cleaner setup and produce fewer environmentally problematic byproducts than other production methods.

But the bacterial

approach has stayed limited to just a few products due to inefficiencies. Now, a research team at

Harvard's Vise Institute for Biologically inspired engineering says they've developed a system to get microbes

to produce chemicals dramatically faster and more efficiently. The technique uses Darwinian

principles over multiple iterations, what they call rounds of efficiently. The technique uses Darwinian principles over multiple iterations,

what they call rounds of evolution. The study is in the proceedings of the National Academy of

Sciences. The researchers induced mutations in specific genes related to the expression of the desired

molecule. They then tweaked the bacteria so that genes for antibiotic resistance only become active when the cells make some of the sought-after product.

With antibiotics present, cells die that do not produce enough of the product, because those cells also do not have the life-saving resistance to the antibiotics.

The surviving cells, however, show promise. The system takes the cells through this evolutionary cycle repeatedly,

eliminating unproductive bacteria each time. The end result, microbes that synthesize the chemical

of interest with 30 times the output of current bacterial compounds production systems and up to

a thousand times faster. The researchers say their program could work to efficiently produce

a wide variety of

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