WIKIMEDIA, NISHIMASU ET AL.
An environmentally dependent method to excise particular genes and eliminate genetically modified organisms (GMOs) if they leave the lab, published this week (May 19) in Nature Communications, uses an inducible CRISPR/Cas9 genome-editing system to snip out vital pieces of the E. coli genome.
The most recent published attempts at creating such a GMO “kill switch” relied on making the survival of genetically-modified bacteria dependent on synthetic amino acids that were only available under laboratory conditions. In the latest study, scientists at MIT created a system that would instead make fatal changes to the bacterial genome when triggered by a change in environmental conditions.
The system, dubbed DNAi, contains two components: CRISPR targeting RNAs, which direct the destruction of a particular gene, are always expressed, and ...
