Biological "lock" for artificial organisms

Genetically modified or fully synthesized living organisms inspire great hopes, but at the same time carry some threat. Although the risks are usually exaggerated, but still there is a chance that going out of control a synthetic organism will change the existing ecosystem.

Physical isolation in laboratories and industrial sites is not enough: quarantine can be broken due to human error, man-made accident or natural disaster. In addition, some organisms specifically designed to work in an open environment.

Therefore, bioengineers are now actively working to introduce special protective mechanisms that will not allow the virus or bacteria to exist in conditions for which it is not programmed. One of these mechanisms is described in a scientific paper , which was published on January 21, 2015 in the journal Nature.

The authors of the work are a group of geneticists from Harvard Medical School under the direction of Professor George Church (George Church). In 2013, they created the world's first organism with a genome recoded (Genomically Recoded Organism, GRO).
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Then the scientists managed to transcode several codons in the genes, so that these codons began to encode other amino acids, and not those that are embedded in them by nature.

Now this same group of scientists presented a mechanism for biological protection. They succeeded in introducing an artificial protein into various parts of the genome, without which E. Coli cannot translate its RNA into proteins. In total, 49 genome sites were modified to create a reliable dependence of the organism on this substance. The highlight is that this artificial protein does not exist in nature, and the bacterium can not take it anywhere except during reproduction on a special culture in the laboratory.

Thus, the control over the body is reliably established - with a guarantee that it cannot survive in the conditions of the wild nature. According to experts, this is the first practical example in the world of using the strategy of creating artificial dependence on a synthetic substance to control a living organism.

However, this strategy is well known from the Star Trek TV show: this is how the Dominion controlled the synthesized race of warriors, Jem'Hadar.

Church and colleagues grew about 1 trillion E. Coli bacteria, dependent on artificial substances, and in two weeks none of them could escape from the colony. “This is 10,000 times higher than the recommendations for the probability of escape of GMO organisms established by the US National Institutes of Health,” said Professor Church.