Sumedha Guha, Techno India University
One of the growing challenges of the modern world is the rise in the number of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Two main causes of this problem can be traced back to the overuse of antibiotics as prescription drugs and rise in the usage of antibiotics as selection markers in laboratory experiments. Michelle O’Malley’s Lab in UC Santa Barbara addresses both these issues and presents to us a solution of replacing antibiotics used in the lab with fluoride.
In most genetic engineering experiments in the lab, altered GMOs (genetically modified organisms) with antibiotic resistance genes are used as selective markers. For this, a plasmid (circular, extra-chromosomal DNA, usually present in prokaryotes which confer certain specific characteristics to the organism like, antibiotic resistance) with an antibiotic resistance marker is utilized so that the bacterial strain can survive in a culture where the same antibiotic is introduced. Justin Yoo, a graduate researcher at O’Malley’s Lab has proposed to replace the antibiotics used here with fluoride.
Scientists have known for decades the aberrant nature of fluoride as a chemical as well it’s abundance in the natural world. Fluoride is abundant in natural water sources and is toxic to microorganisms. It is for this reason that most microorganisms have evolved around this and have a gene that encodes a fluoride exporter. The job of this exporter molecule is to protect the living cells by removing fluoride ions that get introduced into their body from the surrounding environment.
In studies that took about a month to complete, Justin observed that bacteria which were genetically modified by a method called homologous recombination to render the gene that encodes fluoride exporter in the cell non-functional died. This method also stands to address the economic limitation faced by antibiotic cell selection in biotechnology labs. Not only does using antibiotics cause a chain reaction and end up increasing the resistant strains of bacteria but also, in the long run, the economic load amounts to a huge sum. Both of these problems could be solved using a chemical like a fluoride. This relatively safe, abundant and cheap chemical would be helping labs across the globe cut down significantly on fermentation costs as well as ensuring a halt in the rising number of altered strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
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