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Editorial: Molecular interaction engineering: Biology meets technology

Jürgen Hubbuch Wolfgang Wiechert Biotechnology, as a key enabling technology of the 21st century, is steadily conquering new markets and application fields. Future technologies will crucially rely on integrating nature’s molecular toolbox with technical systems in order to design new devices and processes. Innovative ideas are necessary to develop bio–technical hybrids in a systematic way and to meet the requirements of different application fields like biotechnology, medicine, food, the environment, or energy. As a fundamental prerequisite for such novel technologies, bio(techno)logists and engineers have to cooperate in a much more intensive way than in former times. The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) initiated the national research program “Biotechnology 2020+” to encourage and accelerate this development with the goal to pave the way for the next generation of biotechnological processes. Several key competences were identified, which have to be further developed in order to meet future requirements. Certainly the most important one is the ability to systematically engineer the function of biological molecules and mechanisms for integrating them into technical systems. This emerging research field “molecular interaction engineering” (MIE) is concerned with unlocking the functionality of biological building blocks in order to assemble new biotechnical hybrid systems. As a technical goal, new cell-free applications and processes will emerge that might have only the name in common with present biotechnological systems, but will look and behave completely differently. One central challenge in MIE is the targeted development of biological components that interact in a defined way with various kinds of technical surfaces under non-natural environmental conditions. This is the major aim of the Helmholtz research network MIE, funded in the frame of Biotechnology 2020+. Under the headline “From nature’s toolbox to hybrid technical systems”, the MIE research network brings together competences from biotechnology, structural biology, material sciences, process engineering, and simulation in order to develop innovative tools for molecular interaction engineering at or close to technical surfaces. MIE focuses its activities by the vision of “printed biology” driven by the stateof-the art of current surface microstructuring technologies (cf. Fig. 1). Components and systems are supplied, which, in the long run, will lead to the development of smart biofunctionalized surfaces. Printed biology orients toward the principles of biological circuits in living cells which are organized in highly structured aggregates of active molecules, many of them bound to surfaces. Molecular sensors and actuators enable living cells to control the corresponding signal and material transduction processes. In printed biology, biological components can be immobilized in a precisely defined spatial arrangement on surfaces or in microfluidic devices. By their integration in and the molecular design of thin films and surfaces new technologies will emerge. Together with upcoming 3D printing techniques, this will ultimately lead to novel circuit functionalities and self-controlling bioprocesses. The molecular precondition for such a technology is the availability of different kinds of biological compounds being still functional under technical conditions: