Yale researchers have developed a new way to biologically contain genetically modified organisms, a finding that could have future impacts in agriculture and medicine.
GMOs are organisms where targeted changes have been made to DNA, but a long-standing problem in the biotech industry has been how to best contain GMOs when introduced to the environment.
"We basically want to introduce safety switches for GMOs," said FarrenIsaacs, an assistant professor at Yale University, who worked on a study published in Nature detailing the new containment technique.
Isaacs said that today, GMOs are used for lots of things. "As factories for producing high value compounds like new types of drugs. Renewable sources of fuels. Specialty chemicals," he said. "A great example is the use of engineered bacteria as a factory for producing insulin, which was first done in the 1970s."
But in the future, GMOs could be introduced into more open environments. Think farms -- or as designer probiotics that a doctor might put in your gut to combat disease. Isaacs said its important that safeguards are designed today for these types of GMOs before they're developed.
That's where the idea of dependency comes in. Using the bacteria E. coli, Isaacs and a team of researchers developed a new type of "safety switch" for GMOs, one which makes them rely on man-made amino acids that don't exist in nature.
"What we've done is we've introduced this so that the expression of essential proteins are dependent on these synthetic amino acids," said Isaacs. That means if scientists don't provide the synthetic compounds, the genetically modified organism will die.
Prior biocontaiment techniques relied on deleting or controlling the expression of certain genes. But both of those techniques can be compromised by environmental metabolites or cellular mutations.
Isaacs said, in theory, it's possible his approach, recodingGMOs to create amino acid dependencies, could be used in bigger systems like agricultural crop development, but that's still a long way off.
"Simply because our ability to manipulate those organisms and do recoding aren't as mature as they are with microorganisms like E. coli," he said. "But there was a time when we first had sequencing technologies, we could only sequence viruses in the late 70s. Bacteria in the 90s and then, by the year 2000, the human genome was sequenced. So it is certainly possible that these technologies can advance."
