Suicide-bomber organisms

Image Creative Commons

July 2015

In 2000, 193 governments signed up to a moratorium created at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity which specified that Genetic Use Restriction Technologies (GURTS) would not be field tested nor commercialised.

GURTS, also known as 'terminator technologies', span any genetic trick used to prevent reproduction of GMOs.

The first GURTS were used to produce GM plants with sterile seed which farmers couldn't 'steal' to grow the next year's crop, and which provided very cost-effective in-built protection for industry patent rights. Concerns were raised, and never resolved, that the artificial fertility-damaging genes could spread into conventional crops and cripple yields.

Things went quiet for a while, but then terminator trees loomed over the horizon and, this year, the Brazilian government began to wrestle with idea of embracing crops with GURTS.

It's also emerging that some very fancy genetic systems for self-destruction are under development.

Genetic firewalls

June 2015

Photo Creative Commons

Proteins are made up from chains of standard building blocks termed 'amino-acids'. Amino acids can react with each other to form a chain, and have a side-arm which can be any one of some 24 specific molecules each having its own particular properties. The important properties of the amino-acid side-arms include, for example, size, shape, reactivity, bonding capacity and electrical charges. It's the specific sequence of amino-acid side-chains which dictate the properties of the protein they make up, for example, how it folds into a 3-dimensional shape, what chemicals or chemical groups it can react with or bind to, how easily it can be digested, and its toxicity.

 

Chemical engineers can create an almost infinite variety of artificial amino-acids by attaching novel side-arms. Unnatural amino-acids aren't any use to natural living organisms, but biotech scientists have hit on them as a basis for terminator technology for their genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The principle is that an essential enzyme (see below) is cleverly redesigned to incorporate a novel amino-acid while still preserving its enzymic function.