Christina Smolke

Christina Smolke is an American synthetic biologist whose primary research is in the use of yeast to produce opioids for medical use.^[1] She is Associate Professor of Bioengineering and of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University.^[2]

Biology research

Smolke and her laboratory team at Stanford University have pioneered work into the creation of a synthetic enzyme that converts reticuline, a key element of opioids.^[3][4] The process adds five genes from two different organisms to the yeast cells. Three of these genes come from the poppy, and the others from a bacterium that lives on poppy plant stalks. They produced the first narcotic using synthetic biology.^[5][6]

Awards

• Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (2008)
• National Science Foundation CAREER Award, National Science Foundation (2006)
• Beckman Young Investigator Award, Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation (2005)
• TR100, Top 100 Young Innovators of the World, Technology Review (2004)

Selected publications

• Metabolic Pathway Engineering Handbook (2 volumes), CRC Press. 2009. ISBN 978-0849339233
• Stephanie Galanie1, Kate Thodey2, Isis J. Trenchard2, Maria Filsinger Interrante2, Christina D. Smolke2. Complete biosynthesis of opioids in yeast. Science 4 September 2015: Vol. 349 no. 6252 pp. 1095-1100 DOI: 10.1126/science.aac9373
• Win, Maung Nyan, and Christina D. Smolke. "Higher-order cellular information processing with synthetic RNA devices." Science 322.5900 (2008): 456-460.
• Pfleger, Brian F., et al. "Combinatorial engineering of intergenic regions in operons tunes expression of multiple genes." Nature biotechnology 24.8 (2006): 1027-1032.
• Bayer, Travis S., and Christina D. Smolke. "Programmable ligand-controlled riboregulators of eukaryotic gene expression." Nature biotechnology 23.3 (2005): 337-343.
• Win, Maung Nyan, and Christina D. Smolke. "A modular and extensible RNA-based gene-regulatory platform for engineering cellular function." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104.36 (2007): 14283-14288.

References

1. Rachel Feltman (13 August 2015). "Scientists engineer yeast to turn sugar into hydrocodone". Washington Post. Retrieved 11 February 2016.
2. "Narcotic Drugs Can Be Coaxed From Yeast". The New York Times. 14 August 2015. Retrieved 11 February 2016.
3. "Stanford bioengineers develop a toolkit for designing more successful synthetic molecules". Stanford University. Retrieved 11 February 2016.
4. Nadia Kounang, CNN (28 August 2015). "Can synthetic narcotics lead to heroin? - CNN.com". CNN. Retrieved 11 February 2016.
5. "365 days: Nature's 10". Nature News & Comment. Retrieved 11 February 2016.
6. "Stanford bioengineers close to brewing opioid painkillers - KurzweilAI". Retrieved 11 February 2016.