'Deadman' and 'Passcode' microbial kill switches for bacterial containment.

Nat Chem Biol
Authors
Keywords
Abstract

Biocontainment systems that couple environmental sensing with circuit-based control of cell viability could be used to prevent escape of genetically modified microbes into the environment. Here we present two engineered safeguard systems known as the 'Deadman' and 'Passcode' kill switches. The Deadman kill switch uses unbalanced reciprocal transcriptional repression to couple a specific input signal with cell survival. The Passcode kill switch uses a similar two-layered transcription design and incorporates hybrid LacI-GalR family transcription factors to provide diverse and complex environmental inputs to control circuit function. These synthetic gene circuits efficiently kill Escherichia coli and can be readily reprogrammed to change their environmental inputs, regulatory architecture and killing mechanism.

Year of Publication
2016
Journal
Nat Chem Biol
Volume
12
Issue
2
Pages
82-6
Date Published
2016 Feb
ISSN
1552-4469
URL
DOI
10.1038/nchembio.1979
PubMed ID
26641934
PubMed Central ID
PMC4718764
Links
Grant list
Howard Hughes Medical Institute / United States