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Modified fish and flies could pull pollution out of the environment
Methylmercury is an extremely toxic compound, and unfortunately it's often present in the fish that we eat. Scientists are now developing a method of removing it from the environment, utilizing engineered fish and flies that take up the compound and neutralize it.
Worse yet, as smaller organisms get eaten by larger ones, the contamination makes its way up the food chain, increasing exponentially as it goes. The scientists genetically modified zebrafish (aka zebra danios) and fruit flies by inserting variants of genes from E. coli bacteria into the animals' DNA. A paper on the research – which also involved scientists from CSIRO and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology – was recently published in the journal Nature Communications.
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