Question

From Pestilence to PetThe overheard transmission was apparently a ruse and last ditch effort of these nefarious aliens. Due to the work completed by you and your research teams they have retreated and left behind their toxic vectors on the planet Earth. Despite their transgressions, these cute little monsters are sought after as pets. In an attempt to make them “safe” for plantlife, researchers have managed to identify all of the key enzymes associated with the production of the toxins. Describe at least two ways these enzymes can be dealt with using techniques or strategies that we have learned in this course. For each method, describe how it would eliminate the ability of these cute alien pets to produce these toxins.

Answer 1

ANSWER :-

First of all, the alienated species are able to produce toxins and their ability to produce these toxins needs to be inhibited. There are various ways in which the toxin production can be inhibited.

There are certain antibiotics which plays a vital role in inhibiting the functional aspect of the ribosome which plays a vital role in the translation process or more specifically in the elongation of the peptide chain which is formed of amino acids. One such antibiotic is Clindamycin which specializes in inhibting the function of the ribosome and thus inhibits protein synthesis. Although specificity needs to be enhanced in terms of its localization and activity towards a particular cell compartment.

In one way, the CRISPR (Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) technology can be used as a part of gene editing in which the reading sequence of the gene for the toxin can be disrupted which will change the reading frame and can be targetted to introduce a premature stop codon so as to produce a non-functional toxin protein. This basically uses the Cas9 mediated gene editing in order to target one of the functional enzymes in order to inhibit its associated activity in synthesis of the toxin.

The second way in which the synthesis of toxin can be inhibited is by using RNA interference method. This basically functions in a relatively similar manner to the above mentioned process by means of disrupting the sequence. In this case, by means of an endonuclease called as DICER, a specific cleavage activity is being carried out by means of introducing an RNA sequence complementary to the mRNA and thus leading to the formation of RNA induced silencing complex which is called as RISC which is used to silence the activity of the mRNA of the toxin protein and thus inhibit the synthesis of the protein.

Both the ways are associated with inhibition of enzyme activity by means of interfering with the mRNA sequence of the toxin.