Genetic Entanglement Enables Ultrastable Biocontainment in the Mammalian Gut
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
High Resolution Image Download MS PowerPoint Slide Imbalances in the mammalian gut are associated with acute and chronic conditions, and using engineered probiotic strains to deliver synthetic constructs to treat them is a promising strategy. However, high rates of mutational escape and genetic instability in vivo limit the effectiveness of biocontainment circuits needed for safe and effective use. Here, we describe STALEMATE ( S equence en TA ng LE d M ulti l A yered gene T ic buff E ring), a dual-layered failsafe biocontainment strategy that entangles genetic sequences to create pseudoessentiality and buffer against mutations. We entangled the colicin E9 immunity protein (Im9) with a thermoregulated meganuclease (TSM) by overlapping the reading frames. Mutations that disrupted this entanglement simultaneously inactivated both biocontainment layers, leading to cell death by the ColE9 nuclease and the elimination of escape mutants. By lengthening the entangled region, refining ColE9 expression, and optimizing the TSM sequence against IS 911 insertion, we achieved escape rates below 10 –10 as compared to rates of 10 –5 with the nonentangled TSM. The STALEMATE system contained plasmids in E. coli Nissle 1917 for over a week in the mouse gastrointestinal tract with nearly undetectable escape rates upon excretion. STALEMATE offers a modular and simple biocontainment approach to buffer against mutational inactivation in the mammalian gut without a requirement for engineered bacteria or exogenous signaling ligands.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it