Bio-contained Bacillus subtilis for infection control

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The emerging and ongoing boom in the field of synthetic biology has led to a wealth of innovative solutions to meet diverse**industrial challenges. The biotechnology sector is heavily invested in engineering microorganisms, such as the bacterium Bacillus**subtilis, to create designer microbes that serve an industrially relevant purpose while remaining non-harmful to humans or the**equipment they are designed to act on.**Germiphene, a Brantford Ontario-based Biotech company has developed an evacuation system cleaner called Gobble. The**'active' ingredient in the product is a generally-regarded-as-safe (GRAS) B. subtilis strain that produces a biofilm that cleans and**deodorizes dental suction lines, preventing contamination with pathogenic bacteria. While effective, the product's designer**bacterial strain grows too quickly in the suction lines, causing clogging and filtration blockage, which requires expensive**remediation in addition to daily cleaning protocols in dental exam rooms.**Germiphene has requested that we develop a new B. subtilis strain in which the growth of the organism can be controlled by**addition or removal of an external and inert chemical supplement. Here we propose engineering a strain of B. subtilis that requires**an unnatural amino acid, which is not available in nature, as an essential nutrient for growth and biofilm production. By creating a**strain that depends on a nutrient that is not found in nature, we can prevent B. subtilis from overgrowing by limiting the supply of**the unnatural nutrient.**