ArticleNature chemical biology2016
'Deadman' and 'Passcode' microbial kill switches for bacterial containment.
Article in Nature chemical biology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 189 papers.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
189 citing papers in PubMed.
- Leveraging the bacteria for enhanced cancer immunotherapy: from a perspective of synthetic biology.Cancer biology & therapy · 2026Review
- Enhancing the Secretion Systems: Genetic Engineering of Super Bioagents for Effective Plant Disease Control.Biotechnology and bioengineering · 2026Review
- Systems engineering of engineered live biotherapeutics: A discovery-to-translation framework for streamlining microbiome therapeutic development.Journal of controlled release : official journal of the Controlled Release Society · 2026Review
- Environmental Release of Genetically Intervened Microorganisms: Towards a New Narrative.Microbial biotechnology · 2026Review
- Describing the persistence landscape for introducing microbes into complex communities.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2026Review
- A Metagenome-Based Methodology to Track Genomically Recoded Strains and Assess Their Effects on Indigenous Microbes.Environmental science & technology · 2026Article
- Engineering commensal microbes for host health.Cell host & microbe · 2026Review
- From tumor targeting to tumor accessibility: surface-engineered bacteria as precision living therapeutics for translational medicine.Journal of hematology & oncology · 2026Review
- Thermo-Responsive Living Microspheroids Enable a Regenerative Living Disk-Drive System for DNA Data Storage.Advanced materials (Deerfield Beach, Fla.) · 2026Article
- Multiplexing antibiotic screening assay in droplet microfluidics.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Advances in biocontainment strategies of engineered microbes for use in humans.Current opinion in microbiology · 2026Review
- The dual role of the microbiome in chronic wound management.Cell communication and signaling : CCS · 2026Review
- Multiplexed CRISPR base editing enables pulse-activated irreversible biocontainment of engineered bacteria.Nucleic acids research · 2026Article
- From lab to law: emerging applications, potential benefits, evolving regulatory framework and challenges for engineered probiotics.Microbial cell factories · 2026Review
- mGem: Applying microbiome therapeutic learnings to next-generation agricultural bioproducts.mBio · 2026Review
- Protecting cells at the genetic level and simulating unauthorized access via a biohackathon.Science advances · 2026Article
- Reprogrammed SimCells for antimicrobial therapy.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Programming Next-Generation Synthetic Biosensors by Genetic Circuit Design.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Review
- Associate toxin-antitoxin with CRISPR-Cas to harness (ATTACH) engineered microbes.Nucleic acids research · 2026Article
- Engineering non-exponential proliferation in Escherichia coli using functionalized protein aggregates.Nature communications · 2026Article
129 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Biocontainment systems that couple environmental sensing with circuit-based control of cell viability could be used to prevent escape of genetically modified microbes into the environment. Here we present two engineered safeguard systems known as the 'Deadman' and 'Passcode' kill switches. The Deadman kill switch uses unbalanced reciprocal transcriptional repression to couple a specific input signal with cell survival. The Passcode kill switch uses a similar two-layered transcription design and incorporates hybrid LacI-GalR family transcription factors to provide diverse and complex environmental inputs to control circuit function. These synthetic gene circuits efficiently kill Escherichia coli and can be readily reprogrammed to change their environmental inputs, regulatory architecture and killing mechanism.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.