Génie cellulaire

Cell engineering is the purposeful process of adding, deleting, or modifying genetic sequences in living cells to achieve biological engineering goals such as altering cell production, changing cell growth and proliferation requirements, adding or removing cell functions, and many more. Cell engineering often makes use of DNA technology to achieve these modifications as well as closely related tissue engineering methods. Cell engineering can be characterized as an intermediary level in the increasingly specific disciplines of biological engineering which includes organ engineering, tissue engineering, protein engineering, and genetic engineering. The field of cellular engineering is gaining more traction as biomedical research advances in tissue engineering and becomes more specific. Publications in the field have gone from several thousand in the early 2000s to nearly 40,000 in 2020. One general form of cell engineering involves altering natural cell production to achieve a more desirable yield or shorter production time. A possible method for changing natural cell production includes boosting or repressing genes that are involved in the metabolism of the product. For example, researchers were able to overexpress transporter genes in hamster ovary cells to increase monoclonal antibody yield. Another approach could involve incorporating biologically foreign genes into an existing cell line. For example, E.Coli, which synthesizes ethanol, can be modified using genes from Zymomonas mobilis to make ethanol fermentation the primary cell fermentation product. Another beneficial cell modification is the adjustment of substrate and growth requirements of a cell. By changing cell needs, the raw material cost, equipment expenses, and skill required to grow and maintain cell cultures can be significantly reduced. For example, scientists have used foreign enzymes to engineer a common industrial yeast strain which allows the cells to grow on substrate cheaper than the traditional glucose.