Fingerprinting fugitive microbes
Even in a struggling economy, the job market is booming for genetically engineered bacteria.
These microscopic machines are being put to work making everything from pharmaceuticals to fuels, raising the question of how to track the invisible critters if they ever got loose—or worse, if engineered pathogens were ever released as an act of bioterrorism.
Scientists have developed a software tool that finds characteristic “fingerprints” in the microbes’ DNA that can distinguish altered bacteria from natural ones.