Question

What potential benefit could come from using transgenic bacteria to mitigate (clean-up) oil spills? What could potential negative impacts the use of transgenic bacteria create and how could these impacts best be minimized?

Answer 1

Transgenic bacteria could be very efficient at removing oil spills from seawater.Scientists believe that they could consume large quantities of oil from the BP spill and help the Gulf recover. These oilspills are a type of pollution and cause an impact on the environment.

This trangenic oil-eating bacteria, can cause the emergence of various other mutant bacteria and end up being harmfull to humans (causing respiratory, skin or gastrointestinal complications) and the environment (the broken down products of the oil are released twice as fast causing CO2 increase).

To minimize these potencial negative impacts scientists could introduce a genetic material into a bacteriophage (a virus that infects bacteria) to give microbes that already exist in the ocean the power to break down oil.

Another possible way to avoid the negative impacts of these bacteria is to create a new organism that thrives in the ocean, eats the oil, and needs a certain stimulant to live, that way when they finish their job the organism could be easily killed.