Can fluoride stem growing concern of antibiotics in our synthetic biology world?
Jan
20
In a January 04 2021 article in Science Daily, UC Santa Barbara chemical engineer Michelle O'Malley points out that "with the advent of synthetic biology, there is increasingly a risk that things we're engineering in the lab could escape and proliferate into ecosystems where they don't belong."
A process developed by Justin Yoo, a former graduate student researcher in O'Malley's lab, found that fluoride can eliminate this problem. Microbes that escape into the natural environment would die as soon as it encounters fluoride, thus preventing propagation, according to the Science Daily article.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/01/210104141521.htm