Weaponizing a Virus
Stat News published a very interesting story about medical researchers who are DNA engineering viruses to go after and kill certain bacteria which are resistant to anti-biotics. It’s a worthy goal and I applaud their efforts. It’s fascinating how we can tinker with the building blocks of life to fundamentally change the nature of living things just like programming a machine.
But this story keeps reminding me of all those sci-fi movies where this was how it all went wrong. A science project with a worthy goal that spins out of control. In this case, scientists are literally taking some benign viruses and weaponizing them into becoming efficient killers that aren’t as discriminating about who their victims are. I’m an accountant, not a scientist, so this is all way over my head. But read the following excerpts and tell me it doesn’t sound kind of bone-chilling.
The two other viruses, meanwhile, had to go through a kind of reverse domestication — converted, with genetic engineering, from relatively docile microbial parasites into efficient killers of infection.
“It is exciting. … This study is the first that we’re aware of using an engineered phage,” said Dave Ousterout, chief scientific officer of Locus Biosciences, a company not involved in the paper that is also working on enhancing the antibacterial capabilities of phages.
His team knew that they had other phages that were active against the patient’s bacterial strain — they just weren’t very good at killing it. Some of them slipped peaceably inside its genome; others did a little damage but hardly made a dent in a Petri dish full of bugs. “With a phage that kills efficiently, all the cells are dead,” Hatfull said. “You could read a newspaper through the hole it’s made in the lawn of bacteria.”
These ones just made little cloudy spots.
So they chose a few of them, and began tinkering with their insides. The technique they used took advantage of the microbial proclivity for rearranging genetic material — “They’re willing and able to exchange their genes,” Hatfull said — to delete the bits of DNA that suppressed these phages’ murderous instincts. Without those pieces, they were free to replicate like crazy, the asexual equivalent of rabbits, causing their host cell to explode.
For one of the viruses, they also looked for mutants among the population that proved especially efficient, using a toothpick to select the best killers of the lot. —Eric Bodman, StatNews 5/8/19
I guess they know what they’re doing?
The two other viruses, meanwhile, had to go through a kind of reverse domestication — converted, with genetic engineering, from relatively docile microbial parasites into efficient killers of infection.
“It is exciting. … This study is the first that we’re aware of using an engineered phage,” said Dave Ousterout, chief scientific officer of Locus Biosciences, a company not involved in the paper that is also working on enhancing the antibacterial capabilities of phages.
His team knew that they had other phages that were active against the patient’s bacterial strain — they just weren’t very good at killing it. Some of them slipped peaceably inside its genome; others did a little damage but hardly made a dent in a Petri dish full of bugs. “With a phage that kills efficiently, all the cells are dead,” Hatfull said. “You could read a newspaper through the hole it’s made in the lawn of bacteria.”
These ones just made little cloudy spots.
So they chose a few of them, and began tinkering with their insides. The technique they used took advantage of the microbial proclivity for rearranging genetic material — “They’re willing and able to exchange their genes,” Hatfull said — to delete the bits of DNA that suppressed these phages’ murderous instincts. Without those pieces, they were free to replicate like crazy, the asexual equivalent of rabbits, causing their host cell to explode.
For one of the viruses, they also looked for mutants among the population that proved especially efficient, using a toothpick to select the best killers of the lot. —Eric Bodman, StatNews 5/8/19
I guess they know what they’re doing?
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