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The U.S. military mistakenly sent live anthrax bacteria to laboratories in nine U.S. states and a U.S. air base in South Korea, after failing to properly inactivate the bacteria 11 months ago. The anthrax was initially sent from a Utah military lab and was meant to be shipped in an inactive state as part of efforts to develop a field-based test to identify biological threats. No one appears to have developed any symptoms, but have been given treatments as a precaution.
What went wrong? What are the best way to handle diseases such as this?
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U.S. Military Mistakenly Ships Live Anthrax To Nine States
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You are a fluke of the universe; you have no right to be here.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Joe on Friday May 29 2015, @03:27AM
That would be too excessive. All you would need to do is transform/transduce the vaccine strain with its missing virulence plasmid.
The vaccine strain of anthrax only lacks a plasmid (circular segment of DNA that is much smaller and separate from genomic DNA) that is needed to cause disease in people. As far as I can remember, loss of either pX01 or pX02 (the vaccine strain doesn't have this one) will render the bacteria unable to cause disease.
pX01 encodes the anthrax toxin which can kill immune cells and pX02 encodes the capsule that helps the bacteria evade immune recognition.
http://www.cdc.gov/nczved/divisions/dfbmd/diseases/anthrax_sterne/ [cdc.gov]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthrax_toxin [wikipedia.org]
- Joe
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday May 29 2015, @03:44AM
Synthesizing organisms, especially single-celled bacteria [wikipedia.org] or even viruses, from digital DNA/RNA sequences will be commonplace in the future.
That is the reason why researchers are being discouraged from publishing results on making the flu more virulent or morphine-excreting yeast.
It's also the reason why you can just sequence anthrax strains, destroy the samples, store the DNA, save yourself from embarrassing and dangerous incidents such as this one, and pull it out of "storage" in 10-20 years when you need to do experiments or create countermeasures.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Joe on Friday May 29 2015, @04:15AM
Making the membrane and all the other proteins needed to kick-start a sythesized genome into a "live" state is the much harder part. The example you gave is very similar to what I mentioned. The researchers implanted their synthesized genome into a donor cell instead of putting in a much smaller plasmid into a bacteria that still has its genome.
As for viruses, that is already being done. I'm pretty sure at least one research group synthesized the genome of MERS to get around the complications of obtaining samples of infectious virus.
researchers are being discouraged from publishing results on making the flu more virulent or morphine-excreting yeast
I think it is more to do with scaremongering and post-apocalyptic movies. The "controversial" influenza papers didn't do anything complicated - they repetedly infected ferrets (about ten times) with the virus, until it mutated and aquired aerosol transmission. What basically every article about this study failed to mention was that this "incredibly dangerous virus" that they made "airborne" lost its ability to kill animals.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3388103/ [nih.gov]
- Joe
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday May 29 2015, @04:32AM
You can't put the genie back in the bottle. Once the DNA sequence is widely-known, you aren't subject to the multi-million dollar research efforts of today, but the bioprinting capabilities of 20 years from now, available to non-state actors with a few thousand bucks and time to spare.
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(Score: 2) by Joe on Friday May 29 2015, @06:34PM
The genie is already out of the bottle. Disease-causing bacteria and viruses are already here.
As Sir Finkus mentioned, there is endemic anthrax in livestock. There is also endemic H5N1 ("bird flu"), plague, MDR tuberculosis, MRSA, and many other pathogens. All you need to do is find a sick animal/person and do basic microbiology to get more or induce new mutations.
This is without DNA sequencing or a multi-million dollar lab and the information/technology is available now.
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=7671&cid=189383 [soylentnews.org]
- Joe