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.