New Genomes Evolving

OK, here's something I didn't get a chance to blog aobut last week. Carl Zimmer has an article on Slate about "Spinach, Lettuce, and the Limits of Bioterrorism". It's about the e.coli strain O157:H7, of past widespread gastrointestinal problems. He discusses a paper reporting widespread genome rearrangements in this strain compared with other non-pathogenic strains. Sure enough Zmmer is good on his reading but he seems to draw some conclusions that leave many, including this reader, in doubt. At the end of the article he writes:

Even if a government built a giant lab just for the purpose of
stumbling across a new pathogen, it might take centuries or millenniums
to hit on something like the spinach strain.

That's the limit of bioterrorism part. The thing I am not so convinced about is that we don't need to sit around waiting for mutations to happen. Geneticists have been inducing mutations on a wide scale since they started calling themselves that name, it's just a matter of shifting though the rubble. Shoot first and ask questions later is the motto of Forward Genetics (point and shoot being the motto of Reverse Genetics). One only need to induce enough translocations, deletions and duplications whilst selecting under the right conditions. The trick of course is figuring out how to induce enough of those large scale mutations and how to select for those that you want to keep, but that hardly seems a limit to bioterrorism.