MEXICO: Scientists say they’ve figured out a way to unboil an egg, a not-so-frivolous accomplishment that could strengthen the efficiency of biotechnology processes which includes cancer therapies and meals production.
Scientists call it synthetic firewall, a system that blocks GMO’s from entering the wild and surviving in it.
“I don’t want to be alarmist or anything, but I think the point is that these organisms do spread,” said George Church, a lead researcher and Harvard Medical School genetics professor.
“It’s a scenario. You want to get ahead of these things, rather than wait until you have a problem,” he said.
According to Church, this means that they can now create GMO’s that can do vital tasks that can die afterwards without trace.
One important task that GMO’s can do according to the scientists is to clean oil spills or break toxins in a contaminated land. Once they are done with their task, then they can die afterwards since they are designed not to survive in the real environment.
For example, Church and his colleagues from Harvard and Yale universities used E. coli bugs that are resistant to viruses but reliant to a certain amino acid. Officially called as “genetically recoded organisms,” the engineered E. coli bugs can only survive when feed with the synthetic amino acid. The said E. coli bug will need tens of precise mutations to survive without the artificial amino acid and the synthetic amino acid used to feed it cannot be found anywhere in nature. This means there is very small chance that the E. coli bug can survive when released in the wild.
George Church at Harvard and Farren Isaacs at Yale said that with their designed GMO, they can assure the public that they can vital tasks without fear of spreading in the wild afterwards.
