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Team:Paris Bettencourt/Modeling
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==Overview== | ==Overview== | ||
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| - | According to Dana et al [ | + | According to Dana et al<sup>[[#References|1]]</sup> there are four areas of risk research in environmental application of synthetic biology: |
*Differences in the physiology of natural and synthetic organisms will affect how they interact with the surrounding environment, | *Differences in the physiology of natural and synthetic organisms will affect how they interact with the surrounding environment, | ||
*Escaped microorganisms have the potential to survive in receiving environments and to compete successfully with non-modified counterparts, | *Escaped microorganisms have the potential to survive in receiving environments and to compete successfully with non-modified counterparts, | ||
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*Adapting existing safety assessment tools to synthetic biology. | *Adapting existing safety assessment tools to synthetic biology. | ||
*Proposing methods to assess safety in synthetic biology. | *Proposing methods to assess safety in synthetic biology. | ||
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| + | ==References== | ||
| + | [[#Background|1]] - Genya V Dana et al. Four steps to avoid a synthetic biology disaster. 2012. Nature vol 483 | ||
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Revision as of 09:24, 24 October 2012
- Main
- Team
- Project
- Achievements
- Human Practice
- Safety
- Notebook
- Attributions
Overview
Delay system
Semantic containment
Restriction enzyme system
MAGE
Suicide system
Encapsulation
Synthetic import domain
Safety Questions
Safety AssessmentContents |
Overview
Safety is an important issue in synthetic biology, especially on environmental related projects. We already tried to answer the question, “how safe is safe enough?” by involving experts, publics and scientists, and also building biosafety devices. However, to really answer the question, actually we need first to ask ourselves a more basic question, “how do we measure safety?”. As we see synthetic biology as an engineering approach to biology, we could think about adaptation of safety engineering, a well studied engineering subset, that has been widely use to minimize risks on many fields of engineering, such as mechanical engineering, aircrafts, and manufactures. However, the risks they face are surely different from the risks of synthetic biology. Here we propose an approach to assess safety for environmental release of genetically engineered bacteria (GE bacteria).
Background
According to Dana et al1 there are four areas of risk research in environmental application of synthetic biology:
- Differences in the physiology of natural and synthetic organisms will affect how they interact with the surrounding environment,
- Escaped microorganisms have the potential to survive in receiving environments and to compete successfully with non-modified counterparts,
- Synthetic organisms might evolve and adapt quickly, perhaps filling new ecological niches, and
- Gene transfer.
Knowing that there are different areas of risk that we need to take into account, we need to design our safety containment with different parts to deal with each of them. Identifying the relationship between one part and the others will help us to see the reliability of the overall system.
Objectives
- Adapting existing safety assessment tools to synthetic biology.
- Proposing methods to assess safety in synthetic biology.
References
1 - Genya V Dana et al. Four steps to avoid a synthetic biology disaster. 2012. Nature vol 483
