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New Advance Confines GMOs To the Lab Instead of Living In the Wild
BarbaraHudson (3785311) writes In Jurassic Park, scientists tweak dinosaur DNA so that the dinosaurs were lysine-deficient in order to keep them from spreading in the wild. Scientists have taken this one step further as a way to keep genetically modified E. coli from surviving outside the lab.
In modifying the bacteria's DNA to thwart escape, two teams altered the genetic code to require amino acids not found in nature. One team modified the genes that coded for proteins crucial to cell functions so that that produced proteins required the presence of the synthetic amino acid in the protein itself. The other team focused on 22 genes deemed essential to a bacterial cell's functions and tied the genes' expression to the presence of synthetic amino acids.
For the bacteria to survive, these synthetic amino acids had to be present in the medium on which the bacteria fed. In both cases, the number of escapees was so small as to be undetectable."
Isn't this how they kept the dinosaurs from escaping in the first Jurassic Park book? And we all know how well that worked out... CHAOS THEORY!
A mutation in the DNA undoes the genetic engineering and we've got a new strain of e. coli in the wild.
What happens when the human body naturally evolves to depend on this amino acid itself? I guess if you keep eating such GMO's you'll be okay? Win-Win for the corporations again (and a few decades to late to try and contain their absolutely ridiculous public testing).
God Kills Dinosaur
Got Creates Man
Man Kills God
Man Creates Dinosaur
Dinosaur Kills Man
``the number of escapees was so small as to be undetectable``.
This doesn`t exactly sound encouraging. Even one escapee out of trillions of bacteria, through the wonder of exponential clonal replication, will result in escape. This method might buy a day or two. And I haven`t even mentioned natural selections proclivity to ruin even the most well thought out containment schemes. And that messing with the basic cell machinery will greatly reduce the viability (and economic productivity) of these bugs.
"Life uhh finds a way uhh" - Jeff Goldblum
http://news.firedoglake.com/20...
The provision protects genetically modified seeds from litigation in the face of health risks and has thus been dubbed the “Monsanto Protection Act” by activists who oppose the biotech giant. President Barack Obama signed the spending bill, including the provision, into law on Tuesday
Since the act’s passing, more than 250,000 people have signed a petition opposing the provision and a rally, consisting largely of farmers organized by the Food Democracy Now network, protested outside the White House Wednesday. Not only has anger been directed at the Monsanto Protection Act’s content, but the way in which the provision was passed through Congress without appropriate review by the Agricultural or Judiciary Committees. The biotech rider instead was introduced anonymously as the larger bill progressed — little wonder food activists are accusing lobbyists and Congress members of backroom dealings.
i like dinosaurs .i wish they were real :)
It is unfortunate that the summary author needed to toss in the remark about Jurassic Park. It's not a meaningful comparison (and is, indeed, based on a technical mistake in the book), and it doesn't appear in the linked article. As the earlier comments suggest, it does generate interest based on the pop culture reference. It's sad to see that Slashdot and its contributors resort to that kind of cheap chicanery to grab eyeballs, just like all the other loud, integrity-free, "journalism" outlets that seem to pervade the internet.
They said the same thing about the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.
Dr. Alan Grant: [finding egg shells] Oh my God. Do you know what this is? This is a dinosaur egg. The dinosaurs are breeding.
Tim: But Grandpa said all the dinosaurs were girls.
Dr. Alan Grant: Amphibian DNA.
Lex: What's that?
Dr. Alan Grant: Well, on the tour, the film said they used frog DNA to fill in the gene sequence gaps. They mutated the dinosaur genetic code and blended it with that of a frog's. Now, some West African frogs have been known to spontaneously change sex from male to female in a single sex environment. Malcolm was right. Look...
[we see a trail of baby dinosaur footprints]
Dr. Alan Grant: Life found a way
So they are letting modified E.Coli out into the wild. And they can't detect it, and who honestly knows if some mutation is or is not going to allow the bacteria to still live and thrive.
How to they propose to prevent these lab E. coli from mutating the ability to survive in the wild?
It would take a LOT more than 1 mutation. They modified over 1% of the DNA.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
. What the hell is wrong with people that they think they are smarter than mother nature?
Mother nature wants us all dead and does her damnedest to make that so we better be smarter than her or we are goners.
Our arrogance will kill us all someday.
There are things man was not meant to know MUAHAHAHA. Why is it greens always sound like the bad endings of horror movies from the 50s ?
And now they can sell farmers the missing ingredient!
Way back in the 1970s, a scientist named Roy Curtiss engineered Chi-1776: a strain of E. Coli for precisely these purposes. It was unable to synthesize d-amino pimelic acid, it couldn't exchange plasmids(*) with other bacteria, it was killed by detergents and UV radiation, and so on.
It was subsequently discovered that the survival of Chi-1776 was greatly enhanced when a plasmid commonly used for research was added.
Chi-1776 was also found difficult to work with. The very safeguards that made it safe for experimental use also made it difficult to grow. In fermentors it was outcompeted by just about everything else in the environment, so absolutely sterile environments were required, and this turns out to be very difficult in practice.
In response, researchers turned to a strain labelled K-12 which had a higher survival rate than Chi-1776, but couldn't infect the digestive tract and also couldn't survive in the wild.
Also, despite strict procedures in place for chemical or physical disinfection, K-12 was subsequently found in the sewer systems supporting the University of Texas.
Those who cannot remember history are doomed to repeat it, or so they say. Does that statement apply to the current situation?
(*) A plasmid is a "loop" of DNA that is sometimes exchanged between bacteria. It's a method of propagating useful survival traits without going through the full reproductive cycle.
Uh... uh... Life.... Uh... Finds a way.
the ingenuity of random chance is pretty fucking terrifying though. do they know that they caught all the redundancies? and we're not talking about 1 generation a year either, we're talking about 1 generation every 30 minutes. we've got bacteria that can survive fucking boiling. we really think a thing like... crippling protein production is going to stop bacteria?
So what happens....
It always escapes, adapts, finds alternatives, worse IT MUTATES, MATES, MORPHS with existing E. Coli, and slowly eradicates E. Coli.
Oh that's great you say, NO IT'S NOT!!!! Believe it not you NEED E. Coli bacteria. There are numerous varietes, many are beneficial to the digestive track. Some are bad, but many facilitate digestion.
Not to mention that bacteria have been known to transfer genes between bacterium near them. (Bacteria: The original file sharers!) Say one of these gets out and encounters a similar bacteria without the "confinement genes". Could it laterally transfer genes that would help it survive without the "lab required environment"?
I'm not saying we should never experiment on anything (we should) or that building in safeties like this isn't a good idea (it is), but we should never let our guard down and say "We've thought of everything! This has fully secured us against any possible problem!"
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
the end is near
Yes, it's possible, but very very unlikely.
That means over a long enough time, it will happen.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
One line of defense against breakouts are the tanks and vats used to house heavily modified microbes. But these can leak, with microbes hitching rides off-site on workers' clothing, for instance.
Researchers have come up with other ways of controlling the spread of modified organisms, such as introducing biological kill switches. But these still offer organisms biological escape hatches, at least in principle. The organism can randomly mutate in ways that blunt control efforts. It can mooch a replacement for the synthetic compound it needs from natural analogues in the environment. Or it can incorporate DNA from other wild organisms into its own genome, allowing it to use nutrients found in the wild.
The two teams involved with the new studies applied complementary approaches to overhauling the genetic structure of a strain of E. coli bacteria that Dr. Church’s lab had altered to enhance virus resistance.
These were not merely genetically modified organisms; they had become genomically recoded organisms, or GROs. The changes to the bacteria's genome involved one out of every 64 segments along the entire length of the organism's DNA that corresponds to a specific amino acid needed to produce protein. DNA carries the coding for 20 types of amino acids.
In modifying the bacteria's DNA to thwart escape, the two teams altered the genetic code to include information for producing amino acids not found in nature but created in the lab.
One team focused on genes that coded for proteins crucial to cell functions, modifying them in ways that produced proteins that required the presence of the synthetic amino acid in the protein itself. The other team focused on 22 genes deemed essential to a bacterial cell's functions and tied the genes' expression to the presence of synthetic amino acids.
For the bacteria to survive, these synthetic amino acids had to be present in the medium on which the bacteria fed.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
- blade runner reference
I know it's too much to expect people to RTFA, but as others have pointed out it would take much more than 1 mutation. The main point the "doom and gloomers" are missing is that these modifications are designed to complement existing containment techniques.
Think of it as a potential way for researchers to more safely work with deadly bacterium such as anthrax. They would still use all of the traditional containment methods, but have an additional fail-safe built in. Ultimately these researchers hope to come up with multiple overlapping safeguards to provide even better safety.
It's beyond me, how anyone could object to making it harder for bacteria to escape from the lab!!
...to make an alteration in the evolvement of an organic life system is fatal. A coding sequence cannot be revised once it's been established.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
i'm not concerned if they survive or not, i'm concerned if wild bacteria can pick over their corpses and get weird.
" ... the number of escapees was so small as to be undetectable." Until the undetectable escapees start multiplying and sudeenly they're detectable.
They can't, because if they incorporate the modified DNA, they will die because they too will be dependent on an amino acid not found in nature.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
uh, uh, finds a way...
they won't die, that's what redundancy is for. a living bacteria that incorporates an extra chunk of genetic material won't die simply because the extra chunk requires something else to function. It'll just be non-functional, which doesn't mean it won't mutate within wild-type.
also, i was under the impression that the things that only the control mechanisms required the nifty amino acids, but the nifty bits probably wouldn't.