By Archana Pyati
In November 2025, the Department of Defense announced that it would focus on six critical technology areas that will “define the future of American military superiority.” The six areas represent “the cutting edge of research and engineering” aimed at ensuring that the United States military “remains the most lethal fighting force in the world.” Underpinning these six technology areas are decades of basic science and fundamental research conducted at America’s research universities.
In a series of articles, the Association of American Universities (AAU) is highlighting the contributions of university research in developing critical technology areas. This article – the second of six – discusses the university-based research behind biomanufacturing, which leverages synthetic biology to create reliable and resilient supply chains to support our armed forces.
Secure supply chains and logistics are essential to successful military operations and combat readiness for United States armed forces. Without continuous access to munitions, equipment, fuel, food, and medicines, American warfighters cannot complete missions and return home safely.
Existing U.S. military supply chains and energy sources are highly dependent on oil and gas as well as petrochemicals and their associated products, including Kevlar, plastics, and rubber. But these petroleum-based supply chains present a significant vulnerability for our military, because many critical chemicals used in defense manufacturing have single domestic suppliers or are produced by foreign nations.
Recognizing these risks, the U.S. military is transitioning toward a process known as biomanufacturing to reduce dependence on external sources of raw material and develop greater self-reliance. This transition involves moving away from petrochemical-based supply chains toward those based in synthetic biology – a discipline that originated in university research labs and that is based on decades of discovery in the life sciences (molecular biology, biochemistry, and genetics), engineering, and computer science.
What Is Biomanufacturing?
Biomanufacturing is the industrial-scale production of chemicals and other high-value materials through synthetic biology, an interdisciplinary field that allows scientists to modify the genes of microbes (bacteria, yeast, viruses) to express characteristics or perform functions that they wouldn’t normally have or perform in nature. Biomanufacturers produce chemicals in large fermentation vats where microbes are fed sugars and salts – similar to how beer is brewed.
Genetically engineered microbes can be programmed to create materials for our military (or other purposes) on demand – such as converting biomass into fuel, fabricating jam-resistant bioelectronic computing components, or producing precursor chemicals (basic ingredients in biochemistry) that can be turned into medicines, explosives, or textiles. Scientists can also create entirely artificial cells and organisms from synthetic genetic sequences.
In its biomanufacturing facility at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, the U.S. Army is already producing precursor chemicals for fuel used in Hellfire missiles. The American military is also partnering with research universities to produce uniforms with self-healing textiles with bioengineered fabric that can repair itself when punctured, offering significant protection to soldiers in the field. Biomanufactured medical glue and adhesives could be used in wound care, saving countless lives on the battlefield.
Such capabilities are critical, particularly in hostile environments or contested territory where supply chains may be unavailable to American military personnel or under active threat.
Biomanufacturing and synthetic biology integrate multiple innovations that have been developed by academic scientists since the 1960s. It is important to note that these innovations began as curiosity-driven scientific experiments aimed at figuring out how fundamental biological processes work.
These discoveries were then applied to real-world challenges like finding cures for chronic and infectious disease. Fundamental science led to medical breakthroughs, generating thousands of patents and launching the billion-dollar biotechnology industry, which is considered synthetic biology’s predecessor.
Over decades of generating new knowledge through curiosity-driven research, university scientists have pioneered the tools and techniques that today make synthetic biology and biomanufacturing possible.
Restriction Enzymes and Recombinant DNA
DNA sequences are the chemical building blocks of genes; they provide blueprints or instructions to cells for conducting basic functions like breathing and digestion and expressing traits such as hair and eye color.
In order for scientists to engineer microbial genomes for specific purposes, they need tools to manipulate DNA sequences. Two major discoveries in molecular biology – restriction enzymes and recombinant DNA – made it possible to cut DNA, combine it into new sequences, and insert it into host cells for replication. These would become foundational techniques in genetic engineering.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, researchers at Harvard University and Johns Hopkins University discovered that restriction enzymes naturally found in bacteria have the ability to cut DNA at precise locations. Restriction enzymes became known as “molecular scissors,” which could be used in multiple applications, including the production of synthetic insulin or vaccines. Researchers Werner Arber, Hamilton Smith, and Dan Nathans won the 1978 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their work on restriction enzymes.
Recombinant DNA is another major advancement without which the biotech and synthetic biology revolutions would never have occurred. Recombinant DNA enables scientists to introduce genes from one organism into another for biomanufacturing purposes. Scientists use restriction enzymes to cut DNA sequences from a source organism and insert it into a host organism’s cells, creating recombinant DNA and changing the host’s genome. These genetically engineered cells can be cultured to make billions of copies of a desired gene or protein that can then be used for medical, agricultural, or industrial purposes that support national defense and our military.
Several university scientists are credited with inventing recombinant DNA technology, including Stanford University biochemist Paul Berg, who was the first to splice a viral gene with bacterial DNA in 1971 and received the 1980 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his achievement. Around the same time, University of California, San Francisco biochemist Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, were developing their own recombinant DNA using bacterial plasmids to transfer and clone beneficial genes. Their research received funding support from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Boyer and Cohen secured patents for recombinant DNA and, ultimately, Boyer would go on to co-found Genentech, the first biotechnology company, in 1976. Based in San Fancisco, Genentech currently employs more than 21,600 people worldwide and has an estimated annual revenue of about $3.4 billion.
CRISPR-Cas9 Gene Editing
Fast-forward a few decades, and a new, more precise and efficient set of “molecular scissors” emerged in the form of the CRISPR-Cas9 technology. CRISPRs are DNA sequences that naturally occur as part of bacterial immune systems and were first identified by scientists in Japan and France in the 1980s and 1990s. In the mid-2000s, French biochemists discovered that bacteria involved in yogurt production used CRISPRs and Cas9 proteins to immobilize the DNA of invading viruses by cutting and incorporating the DNA into their own genome.
The watershed moment came in 2012, when scientists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier discovered that Cas9 could be programmed to target and edit any DNA sequence with unprecedented precision, giving scientists the ability to repair genetic mutations, cure genetic disorders and diseases, and essentially rewrite the genetic code of any organism. The technology has already been deployed to save a baby’s life.
Doudna, whose lab has received $1.5 million in NSF funding and $2.1 million from the NIH, is the Li Ka Shin chancellor’s chair in biomedical and health sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. She and Charpentier, scientific and managing director of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin, won the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry for their discoveries.
Getting Warfighters What They Need
Synthetic biology, biomanufacturing, and metabolic engineering are emerging interdisciplinary fields that allow our military and other industries to take advantage of home-grown, biologically based systems where microbes effectively become factories to produce cost-effective molecules and materials at industrial scale. These fields have already transformed health care, unleashing the production of personalized medicines and therapeutics.
These innovations build upon decades of fundamental university research in engineering and the life sciences, including molecular biology, biochemistry, and genetics, dedicated to understanding how genes, enzymes, and other cellular machinery operate.
The stakes for the U.S. military to develop domestic supply chains in biomanufacturing couldn’t be higher, noted Henry Gibbons, a research microbiologist at the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Chemical Biological Center, in a recent article: “A more complete domestic defense supply chain means more certainty in getting the warfighters what they need when they need. Developing new, specialized materials increases warfighter lethality and survivability.”
Archana Pyati is editorial and content officer at AAU.