WIKIMEDIA, MATTOSAURUSOne of the biggest concerns about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) is that they can infiltrate wild populations and spread their altered genes among naturally occurring species. In Nature today (January 21), two groups present a new method of containing GMOs: by making some of their essential proteins reliant upon synthetic amino acids not found outside of the laboratory.
“What really makes this a valuable step change is that kill switches beforehand were very susceptible to mutation or other conditions, such as metabolic cross feeding, from basically inactivating them,” said Tom Ellis, a synthetic biologist at Imperial College London who was not involved in the studies. The new approach circumvents some of those problems by making it extremely unlikely for the genetically modified bacteria to be able to survive outside of the conditions dictated by their custom-designed genomes.
Both research teams—one led by George Church at Harvard Medical School and the other by Farren Isaacs at Yale University—based their work on so-called genetically recoded organisms (GROs), bacterial genomes that have had all instances of a particular codon replaced by another. Church and Isaacs, along ...
