Expanding the Toolkit
After determining the general direction our project was headed towards, we came up with an array of side-projects that would supplement our goal of enabling C. elegans to chemotax towards pollutants in the environment.
Staying Clean: Biodegradation of Pollutants
Upon discovering that a bacterium, Pseudomonas putida, has the ability to degrade naphthalene through a specialized pathway, we worked on a proposed construct that serves as a thought experiment on the ability of C. elegans to acquire biodegradation capability. The P. putida pathway is extensive, however, we propose that with enough time and resources, the entire pathway could be engineered in C. elegans to allow the worm to eat up naphthalene.
Staying Secure: Applying a Kill Switch
A kill switch to allow us to destroy the engineered C. elegans if the organisms threaten to destory the environment and surrounding ecosystems and species: We have come up with multiple kill switches, the most prominent of which are MRT-2 mutant and RNAi knockout. MRT-2 mutants are incapable of living past a certain number of generations due to accumulated telomere shortening and end-to-end chromosome fusions. RNAi knockout, on the other hand, works by taking advantage of the worm’s natural tendency to take up RNA from the environment and bacteria it digests. If we feed the worm bacteria with RNA pieces that cause sterility, we could control the worm population.
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