Construction and behavior of biologically contained bacteria for environmental applications in bioremediation

A recombinant biological containment system may be used to control the growth of Pseudomonas putida in response to the presence or absence of the alkylbenzoates that it degrades. In the absence of alkylbenzoates, a regulatory cascade drives expression from the Plac promoter fused to the gef gene, whose product is a killing protein. Contained strains were genetically stable and survived well as long as alkylbenzoates were present.