Adapted from a UC Berkeley news release. Synthetic biologists have successfully engineered microbes to make chemicals cheaply and more sustainably. However, researchers have been limited by the fact that microbes can only make molecules using chemical reactions seen in nature. A collaboration between scientists at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley has engineered the microbe E. coli to produce a molecule that, until now, could only be synthesized in a laboratory. To achieve this outcome, the researchers integrated a specific type of modified enzyme into E. coli, along with a pathway to produce a precursor molecule. This was then converted into