Seminars

Engineered bacteria have potential uses in agriculture and pollution clean-up, but their persistence in the environment is a concern. We developed a genetically-encoded safety switch that couples growth of soil bacteria Klebsiella variicola to an artificial root exudate produced by genetically modified Arabidopsis plant. We have demonstrated that the bacteria die in culture without the exudate and in soil without the GM plant. Adapting this system for use with engineered crops could aid engineered bacterial control and their use in agriculture.

Genetic variants can impact cell mechanism and function. However, it is difficult to assess the effects of genetic variants in a high throughput manner as it is difficult to pair single cell genotyping with cellular phenotyping. Here, we report TOES (targeted optical endogenous sequencing), an approach for sequencing select mutations at the endogenous locus to directly link genetic variants with their optical cellular phenotypes.