Team:BABS UNSW Australia/project/containment

Introduction

Due to the nature of our project, having several measures in place to ensure containment and biosafety is very important. We strongly felt that we should not experiment with introducing the invasion-listeriolysin devices into bacterial hosts until we had developed well characterised and effective safety checks. We focused on two key control measures: the Cre-lox recombination system which would delete genes encoding invasive proteins after entry into a cell, and a toxin-antitoxin system to contain bacteria to specific inducing agar plates and prevent horizontal gene transfer.

The Cre-Lox System

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Why?

The Toxin-Antitoxin System

The Toxin-antitoxin system can classically be looked at as a poison and an antidote-that is one protein will kill the cell, but the presence of the other protein will counteract it.