• Question: Are you able to turn a bug EG.salmonella into a usefull bug? if so why?

    Asked by sorcha to Aggelos, Andrew, Eileen, Naomi, Shane on 13 Nov 2012.
    • Photo: Andrew Jackson

      Andrew Jackson answered on 13 Nov 2012:

      It is possible to alter some harmful bacteria and make them harmless. You can do this by pushing new DNA material into them using viruses that attack bacteria that you can load with different DNA chemicals. Also, you can put useful instructions in to the DNA to get the bacteria to make useful chemicals. Some scientists are even able to get E coli bacteria (that can give us a nasty tummy bug) to produce fuel like petrol that can be used to run engines like in a car http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2010/01/27/microbes-produce-biofuels/

    • Photo: Naomi Elster

      Naomi Elster answered on 14 Nov 2012:

      Far more bugs are harmless or even helpful than are harmful in the first place. But you can take harmful bacteria and make them harmless by using special viruses to inject new DNA into the bacterium. This process does make even harmful bacteria useful. It can make the bacteria make something useful – for example, insulin, which diabetics need to inject into themselves to keep themselves alive, is now made by a bacteria in this process, called genetic engineering. Before we discovered how to do this, diabetics had to use insulin taken from cows, pigs, and even dead bodies!! As a diabetic, I sure am glad we can manipulate bacteria into making insulin now!

      A lot of harmful viruses can have their DNA removed, which means they cannot reproduce inside our bodies to harm us, but their outer coat remains. When these empty viruses are injected into us our immune system learns to recognise the outer coat and builds a set of weapons to attack it. This means that if the real virus ever gets into our system our immune system will be able to destroy it immediately so we don’t get sick. This is how vaccinations work.

    • Photo: Eileen Diskin

      Eileen Diskin answered on 16 Nov 2012:

      Yes you can! There are some scientists doing amazing things by transforming things we think of as ‘bad’ into useful things.

      Even the ‘bad’ ones are really useful – because scientists can use them to study things about diseases, and can learn important things that can be used to make drugs so that when people do get a ‘bad bug’, medicine is available for them!

Comments