TMTI Task 1.6 Genetic Engineering Methods and Detection
- Resource Type
- Technical Report
- Authors
- Source
- Subject
- 59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES BACTERIA
DETECTION
GENES
GENETIC ENGINEERING
GENETICS
MICROORGANISMS
STRAINS
VIRULENCE
VIRUSES
- Language
- English
A large number of GE techniques can be adapted from other microorganisms to biothreat bacteria and viruses. Detection of GE in a microorganism increases in difficulty as the size of the genetic change decreases. In addition to the size of the engineered change, the consensus genomic sequence of the microorganism can impact the difficulty of detecting an engineered change in genomes that are highly variable from strain to strain. This problem will require comprehensive databases of whole genome sequences for more genetically variable biothreat bacteria and viruses. Preliminary work with microarrays for detecting synthetic elements or virulence genes and analytic bioinformatic approaches for whole genome sequence comparison to detect genetic engineering show promise for attacking this difficult problem but a large amount of future work remains.