Scientists Attempt to Create Kill Switch for Genetically Modified Bacteria
January 24th, 2015Pay close attention to the use of unlikely and undetectably small escape rate in the piece below.
Wow.
Of all the places to encounter weaseleze…
I think seeing it in the one about the GMO kill switch has to take the cake.
Via: Discovery:
As genetically-modified microbes take on ever more tasks – from creating new pharmaceuticals to turning out clean fuel sources – researchers have searched for a way to biologically isolate them from their wild counterparts, so that if they were ever accidentally released, they wouldn’t be able to survive.
Now, scientists releasing two separate papers in the journal Nature think they have a solution. They unveiled two different approaches to modifying a strain of E. coli to make it dependent on artificial nutrients. In a controlled environment, such as a research lab or factory, scientists would provide that sustenance. But if the bacteria break free, they wouldn’t be able to make the compounds themselves, and would die.
No Escape
Scientists have previously used similar approaches, making GMO bacteria reliant on synthetic nutrients. But in the past, the GMO bacteria have evolved the ability to live without the synthetic nutrients. Bacteria have ejected the part of their DNA that made them reliant on the nutrients, or they figured out how to cobble together an equivalent of those nutrients from the natural world.
In separate projects, teams led by Yale molecular biologist Farren Isaacs and Harvard molecular geneticist George Church have genetically modified E. coli so that it is totally dependent on synthetic amino acids. And in both cases that need is built in to multiple parts of the bacteria’s genome – 49 times in the Harvard study – so that the likelihood that the bacteria would evolve to overcome the restriction is unlikely. And both strains showed an undetectably small escape rate – the number of E. coli able to survive without being fed the synthetic amino acid.
Good catch of the weaseleze. Re-reading it, I can’t help but think the “undetectably small escape rate” is a feature, not a bug. No pun intended.
If the “small escape rate” is undetectable how did they know any escaped ?