Scroll Top

New genetic firewalls keep engineered alien bacteria safe from outside attack

Futurist_alienbac

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

We’re becoming increasingly adept at coding life and created new kinds of DNA, and that’s good and bad …

 

Love the Exponential Future? Join our XPotential Community, future proof yourself with courses from XPotential University, read about exponential tech and trendsconnect, watch a keynote, or browse my blog.

A nightmare scenario keeps synthetic biologists as well as doomsayers up at night. A strain of bacteria with an extensively revised genetic code escapes its lab and despite having genetic kill switches finds a way to reproduce itself uncontrollably, possibly even harming its host.

 

RELATED
Moon Mark will hold the first remote control car race on the Moon late 2021

 

The bacteria wasn’t engineered to harm. Rather, it had its genetic machinery tweaked to resist infections from dangerous viruses, and now the super-powered bacteria can pump out life-saving drugs, such as insulin, with abandon.

The plot here is completely fictional. But it illustrates the double-edged sword that comes with the promise of synthetic biology, which builds upon a genetic programming language common to nearly all living creatures.

On one hand, hijacking and editing the existing genetic code can endow even the simplest cells with amazing new abilities, such as biomanufacturing new drugs in vivo within the human body or even making new materials such as military grade armour, transforming them into so called living pharmacies, or even biological computers.

On the other, because organisms share the same universal code, they’re vulnerable to outside attacks from viruses and other pathogens—and can transfer their new capabilities to natural organisms, even if it kills them.

 

RELATED
Electrogenetic breakthrough finds a way to control your genes via wearables

 

So why not build a genetic firewall? Well, a recent study in Science did just that. The team partially reworked the existing genetic code into a “cipher” that normal organisms can’t comprehend. Similarly, the engineered bacteria lost its ability to read the natural genetic code. The tweaks formed a powerful language barrier between the engineered bacteria and natural organisms, isolating each from sharing genetic information with the other.

Translation – the engineered bacteria are now resistant to even the most aggressive viruses, with little chance of leaking their synthetic code into the wild. Dubbed refactoring, these genetic firewalls effectively quarantines synthetic organisms and cells from the natural world.

“We have created a form of life that doesn’t read the canonical genetic code and that writes its genetic information in a form that can’t be read,” said Dr. Jason Chin at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, who led the study.

 

RELATED
Online grocer Ocado invests £17m to bring robot run vertical farms to the world

 

The language of life is surprisingly simple. Even though we now have 6, 8, and even 11 base pair synthetic DNA all living things on Earth run genetic codes with four DNA letters – A, T, C, and G. For genes to impact life, they must be translated into proteins, which are made up of 20 different amino acids.

There’s a whole cellular manufacturing process to make this happen. Imagine a DNA strand as a cassette tape ribbon around a spool. In comes a messenger – mRNA – that copies the genetic message, like making a mix tape, and shuttles it to the protein-making factory inside the cell.

Here, a myriad of different workers translate the genetic code into amino acids. The crux is the rule of three: three DNA letters grouped together as a codon correspond to an amino acid. Transporter molecules, aptly called tRNAs, then read the code—say, TCG—and grab onto the corresponding amino acid. Rinse and repeat, and eventually the cell makes a long chain of proteins ready to be further processed into its final 3D structure. But here’s the thing. DNA letters form 64 different codons – yet we only have 20 amino acids. Something doesn’t add up.

 

RELATED
First of a kind AI malware learns and mimics its target systems behaviours to prevent detection

 

The reason is that our genetic code is redundant. For example, the codons TCG, TCA, AGC, and AGT all code for the same amino acid. Can we streamline the genetic code, freeing up “extra” codons for other proteins?

Back in 2021, Chin’s group showed the answer is yes. In a technological tour-de-force, his team rewrote over 18,000 codons in E. coli bacteria – a workhorse for biotechnology and research – and showed the new life form lived and divided happily, but with newly freed codons ready for programming. The team then cleaned house, removing tRNAs that previously “read” the now-defunct codons.

In several tests, the super-powered strain, dubbed Syn61.Δ3(ev5), fought off a myriad of viruses that need to hijack the cell’s genetic machinery to replicate. Because the cell couldn’t read the viruses’ standard genetic code, it was no longer susceptible to the invaders. Or so they thought.

In a recent preprint, synthetic biologists Drs. George Church and Akos Nyerges at Harvard University found that Syn61.Δ3 isn’t as invincible as it first seemed.

 

RELATED
World first as a brain chip implant helps paralyzed man feel again

 

Dousing the bacteria with viruses isolated from multiple sources – pig manure and scrapings from a chicken shed – they found roughly a dozen viruses that could still penetrate the bacteria’s genetic defenses.

Why? A group of insidious suspects are mobile genetic elements – more commonly known as “Selfish Genes.” These hopping bits of genetic code can come from viruses and bacteria, and are also embedded inside our own genome.

Because they are DNA code, these elements can encode tRNAs inside a cell. If a virus harbors these selfish genes, it could open a biological “back door” to infect a virus-resistant cell like Syn61.Δ3, replenishing a lack of appropriate tRNAs with its own copy for replication. This ability renders “a genetic-code-based firewall ineffective,” explained Nyerges and colleagues.

Chin agrees. In the new paper, he took a different strategy – actively sabotaging the delivery of the amino acid serine, instead replacing it with alternatives. It’s like finding-and-replacing the letter “s” in a book and changing it to “p” or “a.” The result is completely unreadable to a normal cell but opens up a world of possibilities for an engineered one.

 

RELATED
Electrifying Nanochips help reverse dramatic muscle loss in patients

 

In all, “we can independently re-assign” two codons to four different amino acids, the authors said, creating 16 new genetic codes. To help the cell read its new code, the team also programmed a slew of tRNAs that help redirect amino acid traffic. These engineered tRNAs can overcome the natural genetic code, instead delivering the programmed amino acid—rather than the naturally correct one—to build a protein.

These genetic tweaks make the Syn61.Δ3 bacteria strain even more alien. In essence, it now has a genetic code based on – but massively divergent from – that of any living creature.

The upgrade also comes with major perks. Bacteria are normally extremely chatty fellows, easily sharing their genetic material. The process, dubbed horizontal transfer, is a terrible headache for synthetic biologists, as their engineered gene elements could theoretically escape into the wild.

The new super strain, however, could neither share nor decode normal genes from natural bacteria. In experiments using mobile genetic elements – the selfish genes known to easily spread – natural and engineered cells couldn’t transfer the genetic code. In a way, the team had programmed a new genetic language in the synthetic strain, severing its communications with natural organisms.

 

RELATED
Living pharmacies within our bodies could help cure jet lag and disease

 

The edits also made the new strain invincible to viruses. Here, the team first scanned the River Cam in Cambridge for viruses that can elude the original strain’s genetic protections. Two strains were particularly vicious, carrying their own tRNAs that can overcome previous genetic protections in cells.

Adding just a synthetic version of these viral tRNAs allowed otherwise non-infectious viruses to invade Syn61.Δ3, the authors said. But the new strain was completely immune against a myriad of viruses, easily shutting down selfish genes.

Chin isn’t the only researcher interested in engineering the next invincible cell. In their preprint, Nyerges and Church used a similar strategy to recode Syn61.Δ3 so that serine was replaced with another amino acid. In preliminary tests, their strain could battle off a dozen viruses that overwhelmed the original strain.

Resisting viruses is just the first step for genetic refactoring. Scientists have long thought that the process could create organisms with new properties, said Chin and colleagues.

 

RELATED
World first as scientists re-grow a frogs amputated leg using a "silk bioreactor"

 

“The strategies we have described should be generally applicable to any gene or genetic system added to the synthetic organism… we anticipate that the principles we have established may be applied to a broad range of organisms.”

And it will likely work as a strategy, right up until the moment it doesn’t and then somewhere doomsayers will say “We told you so.”

Related Posts

Leave a comment

You have Successfully Subscribed!

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This