New Life Made with Custom Safeguards

New Life Made with Custom Safeguards

A new class of species may have been invented, and all in the name of safety. Colonies of Escherichia coli—the gut bug famous from food poisoning outbreaks—have had their genetics tweaked in a way that prods them to produce useful molecules, such as fuels or pharmaceuticals.

But such modified microbes might prove problematic if the microscopic bacteria escape the lab, especially if researchers' goal of endowing them with resistance to viral infection via genetic manipulation is achieved. Such resistance is useful for keeping colonies alive for research but could turn a novel life-form from a microbe that can only survive in the lab or an industrial setting into a bacterium that could outcompete its wild brethren. So now researchers at both Yale and Harvard universities have demonstrated how to build in safety controls: They have made the microbes dependent on artificial amino acids to make the proteins necessary for life. Unless they are purposely fed with those amino acids, any escaped bacteria would die. "This adds another important safety barrier," says biologist Farren Isaacs of Yale University, senior author on one of two papers laying out this approach published online in Nature on January 21 (http://www.nature.com/news/gm-microbes-created-that-can-t-escape-the-lab...).

Nature also dedicated its editorial to this attempt to increase biological containment of genetically modified microorganisms (http://www.nature.com/news/kept-on-a-leash-1.16750).

 

Source: Scientific American, 26 January 2015 (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-life-made-with-custom-safe...)