(Phys.org) —It's a scenario straight out of a sci-fi horror flick. Scientists take a deadly virus that people can only catch from birds and genetically engineer it so we can give it to each other. Unfortunately, the threat of such a highly contagious virus escaping the lab, whether by accident or at the hands of terrorists, could be more than fiction. To ensure that artificial bird flu strains, engineered to be transmissible between mammals, remain confined to laboratories, Benjamin tenOever and his colleagues at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have devised a method of molecular biocontainment that prevents the expression of an influenza virus in humans and mice by altering the virus' genome so it binds to a specific microRNA. Their research appears in Nature Biotechnology.
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