Training: The Manipulation of Bacteria Without Genetic Engineering

A general procedure is to take a sample of bacteria from, at, or near, the site of contamination
from which a pure culture is obtained in the laboratory and identified, using standard
microbiology techniques. The ‘training’ may be required either to improve the bacterium’s
tolerance to the pollutant or to increase the capabilities of pathways already existing in the
bacterium to include the ability to degrade the pollutant, or a combination of both. Tolerance
may be increased by culturing in growth medium containing increasing concentrations of the
pollutant so that, over successive generations, the microbe becomes abler to withstand the toxic
effects of the contaminant. Reintroduction of these bacteria to the polluted site should give them
an advantage over the indigenous bacteria as they would be better suited to survive and
remediate the contamination. Improving the microbes’ ability to degrade a contaminant,
sometimes referred to as catabolic expansion, may be increased by culturing the bacteria in
growth medium in which the contaminant supplies an essential part of the nutrition, such as
being the only carbon source. Only bacteria which have undergone a mutation enabling them to
utilize this food source will be able to survive and so the method effectively selects for the
desired microbe; everything else having died.

It has been argued that under laboratory conditions where cultures of bacteria are isolated from
each other to prevent cross-contamination, mutations are most likely to occur as a result of an
error in DNA replication. This is far less likely to be the most prominent source of mutation in
nature, as the microbes are constantly in close proximity with other organisms and, consequently,
the opportunity for exchange of genetic material is enormous. In fact, the process of DNA
replication has a very high fidelity, the reasons for which are obvious. An increased rate of error
may be forced upon the organism, speeding up the rate of mutation, by including a mutagen in
the growth medium. A mutagen is a chemical which increases the rate of error in DNA
replication, often by causing a very limited amount of damage to the DNA such that the DNA
polymerase, the enzyme responsible for synthesizing DNA, is unable to determine the correct
base to add into the growing nucleotide chain. If the error in the nascent strand cannot be
recognized and corrected, the fault becomes permanent and is handed on through the
generations.