Terrorists 'could make Ebola and deadly flu'

John von Radowitz

Fears of bioterrorists making 'do-it-yourself' viruses or bugs from publicly available genetic instructions could lead to restrictions on such information, according to New Scientist magazine.

Members of the Australia Group a coalition of 34 countries committed to reducing the risks from chemical or biological weapons have already barred the export of "dangerous" DNA, said New Scientist.

Last month a meeting of the group in Paris agreed to "control, for the first time, the intangible transfer of information ... which could be used for chemical and biological weapons".

This could theoretically involve restrictions on posting DNA sequences on genome databases.

Last week scientists at the State University of New York at Stony Brook sounded a warning by demonstrating how they built a polio virus from instructions and DNA materials available on the internet. Dr Eckard Wimmer, who led the team, said: "This is a wake-up call."

Polio is a simple virus to make because it is so small and does not have to make key proteins in order to replicate. But New Scientist reported that scientists had already succeeded in making Ebola using "reverse genetics". They took the virus's genome plus pieces of DNA coding for key viral proteins and added them to cells. Once made, the proteins kick-started the replication process.

"The team got their genome from the virus itself," said New Scientist. "But since the Ebola genome is only slightly larger than polio's, there's no reason why it too can't be assembled from scratch."

The 1918 influenza virus, fragments of which have been recovered from preserved tissue samples, posed another threat.

Jefferey Taubenberger, of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington DC, told New Scientist the sequences of three out of eight of the strain's gene segments had already been published. Two more had been sequenced and would probably be published this year.

It would take a couple of years to finish sequencing the other three segments, said Taubenberger, "but after that anyone could use reverse genetics to bring it back".