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Life... uh... finds a way.
by bagrow 10y ago
Life... uh... finds a way.
- adrianN 10y agoThey literally use the same method: Make the bacteria dependent on a supplied nutrient.
- EGreg 10y agoSo they use "selection" to engineer such bacteria and hope that random mutations and gene-swapping won't find a way out of this?
- greggyb 10y agoGene-swapping is at least mentioned in the fourth paragraph of the article. I would like some more detail on this part, too. They also have more references to virus resistance for what sound like the same reasons: > Fourth paragraph: > The microbes also do not swap their engineered DNA with natural counterparts because they no longer speak life’s shared biochemical language. “Establishing safety and security from the get-go will really enable broad and open use of engineered organisms,” says Farren Isaacs, a synthetic biologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, who led the other study.
- leecarraher 10y agosorta, but the amino acid doesn't exist in nature. so unless something starts making something that nature has never on an atomic level made before, these GM organisms have no where to get it from. In The book JP2 it was noted that the herbivorous dinosaurs ate loads of soy, which has naturally occuring lysine, and the carnivorous dinos ate the herbivores.
- calinet6 10y agoOr, what, like they, uh, "adapt" in some way, like a process of "evolution" or something?
- akiselev 10y agoYeah, you know, how we humans can adapt and evolve in a few generations to use nitrogen instead of oxygen or replace our mitochondria with microscopic oompa loompas. /s Without knowing how critical the added genes are to the organism's metabolism or how they are integrated into its lifecycle, there is no way to tell if it is even possible for the organism to evolve an alternative in any practical time frame. Evolution does wonders over long time scales but even it is beholden to basic physics.
- JadeNB 10y ago> Yeah, you know, how we humans can adapt and evolve in a few generations to use nitrogen instead of oxygen or replace our mitochondria with microscopic oompa loompas. I think that a major difference here is that the length of a generation for bacteria is way shorter than for humans, so that it is feasible for them to evolve in unforeseen ways in an observeable amount of time.
- akiselev 10y agoUnforeseen, sure, but evolution is practically incapable of wholesale changes to an organism at a fundamental level. For example, if we engineered a microbe to use AUCG instead of ATCG for DNA, which would require massive changes to its cellular machinery, even a generation a minute for a million years would not be enough to switch back to regular base pairs because the microbe would be incapable of basic horizontal gene transfer with other microbes or giant evolutionary leaps that require precise simultaneous changes to all of its reproductive machinery. Obviously this is not 100% guaranteed but if we can engineer an organism that fundamentally depends on a metabolic process that is prohibitively difficult to evolve naturally, we can maintain an extreme level of control.
- JadeNB 10y ago> Unforeseen, sure, but evolution is practically incapable of wholesale changes to an organism at a fundamental level. Oh, I see. I incorrectly read the emphasis of your post as being the unlikelihood of change occurring "in a few generations", rather than on the fundamental nature of the changes.
- Aelinsaar 10y agoI give it about 50-50 odds someone was actually inspired by the fiction, directly.
- MWil 10y agoI would read an entire novella on the Lysine Contingency
- runamok 10y agoSeriously. This was the plot of Jurassic Park (the book) where the Velociraptors required lysine dietary supplements. http://jurassicpark.wikia.com/wiki/Lysine_contingency http://jurassicpark.wikia.com/wiki/Lysine_contingency