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Genetically Modified Mouthwashing Bacteria
Moxen writes: "The BBC is running an article about a genetically modified bacterium that is intended to replace the existing lactic-acid-producing variety currently residing in your mouth. Once the new bacteria have replaced the old, you can apparently expect the elimination of 'most tooth decay.' Rather clever, if you don't mind playing host to a colony of GMOs."
This is somethign that all computer people need. Anything that lessens the time that a computer person has to spend away from their keyboard, the better. I for one welcome this, since brushing of the teeth is something that I have to try very hard to remember.
Finally! Nay-sayers be damned, sign me up for this! This is one of those things that makes me proud to be human!
(I am not being sarcastic, I really think this is exactly the kind of thing that science should be doing.)
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
This sounds pretty neat. I'd like to never have to worry about tooth decay again. I'll bet this would do a pretty skookum job of keeping my breath fresher, too. But... Do the scientists who've developed this actually have a clue?
Is this, for example, going to be so successfully alive in my mouth that it'll decide to live elsewhere too? Maybe it will kill my digestive bacteria? Possibly cause less functional first stage digestion in my mouth?
I suppose this, like any new GE type revelation, is one that is only testable imperically. I don't know about anyone else, but that kinda willies my out. Maybe we're creating bacteria-zilla, eh?
I find it surprising that many people I speak with about GE generally place it at the same level of complexity of *any* scientific discipline. Much as I'd like to think that I am a smart fellow because I know some computer stuff, the GE world is waaay waaay more complex than the one I live in. I am convinced that we do NOT have the ability to ensure any level of safety in the deployment of any GE in any form, whatsoever. We just don't have any way of being deterministic about outcomes of GE on any organism.
Maybe I am out to lunch. Please (PLEASE) prove me wrong - but GE seems to be very much a "what happens if we push *this* button" kind of discipline.
oh wait, the ADA will burn this down. Or wait 2X should dentists go back to med school and learn something like Neurosurgery?
You know the Microsoft destroys the night, Linux devides the day...
If it did spread through kissing, how would they make their money back?
Police Officer: I'm sorry, son, you're going to have to come with me. Seems like you've got an illegal copy of DNA sequence 9422136A residing in the bacteria in your mouth.
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
It appears to me that we've evolved to have the organisms in our mouth that we do have for a reason. Whatever that reason may be. Maybe sometimes we should just *not* fuck with nature?
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
Because of the Almighty Buck's all-mighty interests. :|
If we could be free of cavities forever with just one whiff of a spray, then half the dentists out there would be out of business, and so would toothpaste/brush industries.
I would sure like a bit of that spray though.
I have a genetic condition that weakens my teeth somehow. My grandmother had mostly false teeth when she turned 20 and my mother has the same problem. I brush my teeth like 5 times a day and I keep getting cavities. Most of my teeth have already been drilled at least once and I'm only 22 years old
The article says that the bacteria seem to like sugar. What does it turn that sugar into instead of lactic acid?
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
More importantly, it seems implausible that this treatment is a once-in-a-lifetime affair. I might believe it would last a week, but no more than that. What if someone brushes his teeth? Even if one need no longer worry about cavities, brushing is still required to remove plaque and prevent gum disease.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
until it mutates from mouthwashing bacteria to brainwashing bacteria. (which will then be patented by AOL Time Warner, of course)
Of course, there is the question of why this strain would outcompete the resident S. mutans. After a rather infuriating search of the U.FL website I found http://www.dental.ufl.edu/Offices/Oral_bio/Faculty _pages/JHillman.html which includes a list of peer reviewed journal references.(Note: there isn't much more there.)
A quick read of Infection and Immunity, February 2000, p. 543-549, Vol. 68, No. 2 indicates that they created the GM bacteria by deleting almost the entire gene responsible for lactic acid production (lactic dehydrogenase) and make up for the loss by inserting another alcohol dehydrogenase (from Zymomonas mobilis) in the gap. (Which means the other poster was correct - it produces alcohol instead of lactic acid .) The paper also indicates that the bacteria are able to compete with resident mouth bacteria by producing a "Lantibiotic" antibiotic (mutacin 1140). This antibiotic was not introducd by the researchers, but instead is naturally occuring in the (naturally occuring) strain of S. mutans which they selected (because of the antibiotic).
By intentionally creating something which is viable in the short term, we give a huge (and arbitrary) survival bonus to the changes we have introduced. When something evolves in the wild, it is given many more survival tests along the way as it gradually changes.
These survival tests are also test exposures for other organisms. If you are exposed to a totally new bacteria to which no human has been exposed before, you have no defences tailored to fight that bacteria, even though that bacteria may have been given (intentionally or accidentally) specific weapons to attack you. Humans are likely to have developed a resistance to any non-modified bacteria which they have been in contact with over the generations while it was mutating.
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
Either way, if the new bacteria outcompete the old bacteria (which is the requirment for ensuring that they will take over your mouth), then the new bacteria will probably be better able to survive a Listerene attack than the old one.
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
I wonder what the effects are of long term exposure to the amount of alcohol that these bacteria would produce. Would it be enough to gradually harden the cell membranes in the mouth?
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
Well, I'm certain that the dentists & toothpaste/brush industries would/will lobby against the bacteria, but it'll be very much like when they started using robots in car factories. The bacteria will do the dentists job for them, just like the robots did the factory workers job. The result is cheaper cars/less spending on dental products/services. Meaning people get richer and can spend that money on other things. The dentists will eventually get employed in other lines of business... There might be a short surge of unemployment, but eventually all will gain.
The paper can be found here:
e w= full&pmid=10639415
Infection and Immunity, February 2000, p. 543-549, Vol. 68, No. 2:
http://iai.asm.org/cgi/content/full/68/2/543?vi
Americans eat over 100 lbs. of sugar a year, compared with only 12 pounds in 1900. Maybe the reason we need to keep finding ways to clean our teeth is because we're constantly rotting them out of our heads with our sugar-laden American diet. The overconsumption of sugar also leads to osteoporosis and diabetes.
Off course, you will also have to give up the right to kiss other people. I suppose that transfer of this bacteria by kissing or other similar means to unlicensed persons would be an infringement of either the DMCA or the Patent law. Is that going to be the beginning of a new legal based birth control system??? :-)
Why don't they sample these people and isolate the naturally evolved kind, instead of trying to GM-engineer one? <conspiracy theory>Could it be that you can't as easily get funding if you can't anticipate reliable patent-enforced market and production control?</conspiracy theory>
<soapbox>We ought to fix the system somehow, so greed[1] and little-boy-in-the-lab enthusiasm[2] could be better harnessed for the common good.</soapbox>
<fud>Sooner or later we'll get the GM-biological equivalent of introducing rabbits into Australia, except the continent will be our bodies.</fud>
([1,2] Note that I didn't say to eliminate those things. Just to move towards more benign ways of getting rich and having fun. [2] I recognize that there are enthusiastic little-girls-in-the-lab too).
<more soap>Wouldn't it be great if the LCS/AI folks could engineer some cheap, programmable, incapable-of-self-reproduction, insect-size robots that would swarm on command into crop fields and mechanically chew up weeds and pest insects, instead of having GM-engineered crops that resist herbicides[3] and produce insecticides[3] of their own? We could stop fouling our world nest with poison[3], and let oceans, lakes, rivers, streams, etc., gradually recover instead of gradually die. Mother Nature could start thinking of us as a balm instead of a bad skin condition.</more soap>
[3] This is not a call for eliminating Monsanto-type companies and their profits. Just a wish that they would transform themselves and get behind something better than contaminating and poisoning the world.
How about a variety of bacteria that doesn't produce scatane when it digests food? That would be wonderful. I would suggest that it could make some nice ketones instead, so our farts could smell like bananas or something.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
In some states, the blood alcohol level for considering a minor to be under the influence is .02%. I have heard that breath freshening chewing gum can make your mouth "alcoholly" enough to fail the test (only if you are a minor - so they probably think you were only chewing the Dentyne to hide the marijuana smell, anyway).
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
We are certainly not at a point in our understanding where we are ready to let any of this stuff out of the lab yet (although much of it has been released into the wild and has now contaminated other crops which were supposed to be safe).
One problem is that the more arrogant scientists out there believe that they can learn to avoid major screwups while committing them.
Take the mission critical computer programming analogy. You do not test out a new bake of software on a machine which is performing life support on a patient, or operating part of the power grid. You make absolutely sure that the software is going to behave as expected in an isolated environment before installing it in an environment where it is capable of killing people if it fails.
The fact that synthetic DNA codes have propagated in the wild in ways which the GE scientists never expected is very strong evidence that at least some of those scientists failed to complete the testing process.
DNA is the ultimate mission critical system in the sense that if it suffers total failure, all life on Earth bites the dust. It only takes one sloppy engineer/scientist shortcutting the process to break the system in a way which is devastating to the system; however, scientists are currently free to release genetic sequences into the wild which are not properly tested (as evidenced by the fact that they behave differently than expected).
Again, it only takes one of these scientists screwing up (think of how often some engineer in a team breaks the build by throwing in some last-minute bugs) to cause major damage. Like software companies, some scientists are going to be more careful than others (for many different reasons - compare Windows to QNX), and some scientists are bound to do crappy work and try to get it released.
As long as scientists around the world are releasing under-tested DNA sequences (which at this point in our understanding means just about anything that we have come up with), we have a very dangerous situation on our hands.
Here is some reference:
Professor Hans-Heinrich Kaatz of the Institute for Bee Research at the University of Jena found that genes used to modify oilseed rape (canola) were transferred to bacteria in the guts of bees. He experimented with honey bees and GM oilseed rape, which had been modified to resist a specific herbicide; he removed oilseed rape pollen from legs of bees and fed the pollen to young bees. When he examined the intestines of the young bees he found that some carried the gene that resisted the herbicide.
In Mexico, tailored DNA sequences have contaminated native varieties of corn - even those growing in remote areas (100km from the nearest industrial farm). Read the BBC article.
In Canada, they recently discovered that the minimum distance required between fields of GM crops and fields of 'elite' crops is almost an order of magnitude smaller than the distance that is actually necessary to prevent 'unacceptable' levels of contamination (because they found that earlier assumptions about how far pollen would spread were false). Too bad they didn't bother to find this out in the lab... Here's the New Scientist article.
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?