Word: coli
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Hubbard added she fears researchers will create a pathogenic form of E-coli, that might then be carried out of the laboratory...
...experiments will study control mechanisms in the DNA of higher-level organisms. Researchers will transfer DNA from warm-blooded animals into a strain of E-coli, bacteria they claim rarely survives outside the laboratory...
Ruth Hubbard '45, professor of Biology, said yesterday she opposed any plans for conducting recombinant DNA research using E-coli in the Bio Labs...
What makes the prospect especially hazardous is that one of the molecular biologists' favorite tools is the bacterium Escherichia coli, which inhabits every human bowel, is present in normal excrement and is highly amenable to laboratory manipulation. Its natural form is dangerous only when it runs rampant in an accidental or surgical wound or in organs other than the gastrointestinal tract. But a laboratory mutant might cause a plague of infectious disease resistant to available antibiotics. Altered DNA can be dynamite...
...Nature, Postgate and Dixon describe their strategy to encourage conjugation. First they "fertilized" nitrogen-fixing bacteria with a DNA "sex factor" from the common intestinal bacteria Escherichia coll, a non-nitrogen-fixing species. Then they mixed the nitrogen-fixers (now compatible with E. coli) with a strain of E. coli that has a particularly useful characteristic: unlike most bacteria, it can incorporate genetic material from another species. Out of the laboratory-induced union came a small but significant number of hybrid offspring with nitrogen-fixing ability. What is more, some of these crossbreeds could pass on the crucial nitrogen-fixing...