Team:OhioState/Description
What problem did we see?
Genetic biocontainment systems use genetic modifications to allow microbes to be selectively and efficiently killed when deemed necessary. These are useful in preventing unintended effects, so that GMOs can produce their desired result. Different environments require different levels of containment. A closed system, like a lab facility, has relatively low risk and likely needs a minimum level of containment mechanism or none at all because there’s little chance that a microbe will be able to find its required nutrients outside of the designated petri dish. However synthetic biology is being used to address problems that occur in environments outside of the lab. In an open system, such as a forest or lake, there are nutrients all around, and unchecked growth of a GMO would pose a high level of risk to the environment. These are the places where biocontainment strategies are necessary. Without the addition of genetic biocontainment, many synthetic biology projects aren’t able to be implemented.
We found the iGEM registry and literature about biocontainment systems for synthetic biology were hard to find, navigate, and understand. After surveying multiple iGEM teams, the need was clear. We heard from several teams that they had spent months focused on finding a biocontainment system that worked for them. By providing an easy to use suite of tools for biocontainment, we could reduce the amount of time spent searching for biosafety strategies, giving teams more time to be focused on improving and perfecting their projects.
Why is it a problem?
Genetic biocontainment systems are challenging to understand because many different terms are often used to describe similar things. This confusing terminology makes it hard for researchers to quickly identify relevant literature. Genetic biocontainment systems have often been called “biosafety systems”, “kill switches”, and “genetic restrictions”, but we’ve found that this is misleading and unorganized. Instead, we’ve outlined 3 types of biocontainment systems; auxotrophy, genetic circuits, and genome recoding. This simplifies the learning process for users of our database.
Any researcher wanting to implement a biocontainment system would find inconsistent jargon, disagreeing opinions, and many hours of work ahead of them. This time should be spent on developing their project, instead of sorting out the work of researchers before them. With greater usage and innovation in biocontainment, synthetic biology will become safer and the public will trust and support it more.
How did we fix this problem?
There is no single solution to the lack of modern biocontainment tools, so we created several. To help scientists and future iGEM teams quickly implement biocontainment into their products, we curated a selection of functional biocontainment systems. This will create a central location for anyone to quickly find a suitable system for their project.
While the centralized location of available parts will be useful, we also designed a modeling tool to help others predict the biological properties of a theoretical system. This information is useful when determining the optimal parts to use. Our model focuses on predicting how likely a sequence is to mutate.
After gaining extensive kill switch and biocontainment knowledge, we wanted to share our knowledge and to be a resource to other teams. We advertised our kill switch consulting ability and met with teams around the world to give them guidance and feedback regarding their biocontainment system. These conversations served to speed up the process of finding the optimal kill switch for other iGEM teams this year.
We also noticed there was a knowledge gap between the public and scientific community on what GMOs are and how much control scientists have on pursuing experiments. That is why we created a document that simplifies the United States regulations surrounding biotechnology in terms the general public can understand. We also wanted to see the difference of policies in different nations so we also compared policies from two other nations including the United States: India, and Mexico. This is useful when determining what needs to be changed or what is useful. These resources can be found here. To lessen the knowledge gap of synthetic biology in general, we took part in creating educational videos for high school age students with several other iGEM teams.
By doing these things the search process will be easier for other teams who may be looking to implement a kill switch in their project, or for companies who require a kill switch to fulfill governmental biosafety regulations.
References
Thu, & Jeffery A. Steevens Dr. Jeffery A. Steevens is the Senior Scientist (ST) in Biotechnology for the US Army at the US Army Engineer Research and Development Center in Vicksburg. (n.d.). Future Applications of Biotechnology. Retrieved October 27, 2020, from https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/future-applications-of-biotechnology
Sager, B. (2001, October 16). Scenarios on the future of biotechnology. Retrieved October 27, 2020, from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162500001074?casa_token=13ztG2rMqaYAAAAA%3A-73HNlcisuUjceDCDJWpbFONf3G3rUMfiPae2XZIi2IuFHRe_gIyq-VchlhVxnUIEaouQjji1e6l