2 THE BIGGER THE CHALLENEGES, THE BIGGER THE OPPORTUNITIES
Defence Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) style investments,
often called moonshots, have been known to fast-track innovation and
technological development (Weiss, 2014). This style of funding succeeds
because it is multidisciplinary, it provides a degree of funding
certainty based on the successful meeting of project milestones, while
also providing a graceful pathway for unsuccessful projects to unwind.
It is the fail fast mentality applied to ideas that combine high
risks with high rewards. If synthetic yeast research can pivot both to a
more multidisciplinary field of inquiry while also attuning itself to
the grand challenges driving present day funding priorities, then
the field will thrive in the new global environment.
The yeast research community can best accelerate funding bodies’
awareness of the prospects and importance of synthetic yeast research by
better aligning with other critical technologies that have funding
certainty (Figure 2). One example is quantum technologies, including
quantum sensing and computing. The emerging field of quantum
biology―once a theoretical domain peopled by physicists predominantly
concerned with whether biology included non-trivial quantum effects―is
now emerging as a frontier of technological development (Lambert et al.,
2013; Cao et al., 2020). Government investment in quantum computing is
all but assured across the next decade due to the potential for quantum
computers to break existing encryptions standards (NASEM, 2019).
Although it may seem like there is no room for yeast research to align
with quantum computing, it should be emphasised that one of the dominant
areas of early application for quantum computing has indeed been in the
life sciences, with key applications in drug discovery and design (Cao,
Romero and Aspuru-Guzik, 2018; Blunt et al., 2022). As quantum computers
increase in complexity and scale their ability to model larger systems
will rapidly improve. It would not be a conceptual leap to envision how
the yeast research community could benefit by joining with the quantum
sensing and computing community to share both basic and applied research
goals.
Similarly, the well-entrenched area of artificial intelligence (AI) all
but has funding certainty from government and the corporate sector,
while also being characterised by industrial and geopolitical
competition. Both AlphaFold and ESMFold have shown that intractable
biological problems, such as predicting protein folding, can be largely
solved in silico via classical computing approaches (Jumper et
al., 2021; Lin et al., 2023). Predicting protein folding was long touted
as a problem that quantum computing was going to solve, yet it was
classically-trained AI that solved this problem. This highlights the
need for the yeast research community to have a quantum-classical
mindset that takes advantage of methodological advances being produced
on both sides of the ledger. The life sciences and the information
sciences have long been intertwined, arguably the greatest amplifier of
the life sciences since the 1980s has been the accelerations in
computation power often attributed to Moore’s Law . Yet, it is the
inspirational interplay of quantum physics and classical biology that
has often produced the most disruptive advances with the discovery of
DNA being the key example of what can be produced when both communities
collaborate and draw inspiration from one another.
The key benefit that the yeast research community can bring to a
collaboration with researchers in quantum computing, quantum biology or
artificial intelligence is a fundamental understanding of applied
practical problems that will move the needle on grand challengesacross a range of different economic sectors. It has never been more
important to understand and optimise fermentation methodologies for a
changing environment and a changing climate (EBRC, 2022). It has never
been more important to improve the scale and speed at which medical
countermeasures, vaccines and pharmaceuticals can be developed―and this
includes the parallel need to develop low-technology production
protocols for advanced medical technologies. Many rural areas around the
world have bakeries, breweries, wineries and other types of bioreactors
(i.e. fermentation infrastructure) that, if repurposed using yeast as a
chassis organism, could revitalize this infrastructure as the advanced
biomanufacturing technology of tomorrow (Walker and Pretorius, 2018).
Understanding and optimising this kind of biomanufacturing based on a
yeast platform begins with basic research questions that benefit from
both the quantum and classical information sciences. The challenge for
the yeast research community now is to future-proof itself against
political headwinds, environmental change, and technological advances.
That future-proofing begins with multidisciplinary collaboration and
consilience.