Safety by design: Biosafety and biosecurity in the age of synthetic genomics
Stefan A. Hoffmann,
James Diggans,
Douglas Densmore,
Junbiao Dai,
Tom Knight,
Emily Leproust,
Jef D. Boeke,
Nicole Wheeler,
Yizhi Cai
Affiliations
Stefan A. Hoffmann
Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, University of Manchester, 131 Princess Street, Manchester M1 7DN, UK
James Diggans
Twist Bioscience, 681 Gateway Boulevard, South San Francisco, CA 9408, USA
Douglas Densmore
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Boston University, 610 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215, USA
Junbiao Dai
CAS Key Laboratory of Quantitative Engineering Biology, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Synthetic Genomics and Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Synthetic Genomics, Shenzhen Institute of Synthetic Biology, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China
Tom Knight
Ginkgo Bioworks, 27 Drydock Avenue, Boston, MA 02210, USA
Emily Leproust
Twist Bioscience, 681 Gateway Boulevard, South San Francisco, CA 9408, USA
Jef D. Boeke
Institute for Systems Genetics, and Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Pharmacology, NYU Langone Health, 435 East 30th Street, New York, NY 10016, USA; Department of Biomedical Engineering, NYU Tandon School of Engineering, Brooklyn, NY 11201, USA
Nicole Wheeler
Institute of Microbiology and Infection, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK; Corresponding author
Yizhi Cai
Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, University of Manchester, 131 Princess Street, Manchester M1 7DN, UK; Corresponding author
Summary: Technologies to profoundly engineer biology are becoming increasingly affordable, powerful, and accessible to a widening group of actors. While offering tremendous potential to fuel biological research and the bioeconomy, this development also increases the risk of inadvertent or deliberate creation and dissemination of pathogens. Effective regulatory and technological frameworks need to be developed and deployed to manage these emerging biosafety and biosecurity risks. Here, we review digital and biological approaches of a range of technology readiness levels suited to address these challenges. Digital sequence screening technologies already are used to control access to synthetic DNA of concern. We examine the current state of the art of sequence screening, challenges and future directions, and environmental surveillance for the presence of engineered organisms. As biosafety layer on the organism level, we discuss genetic biocontainment systems that can be used to created host organisms with an intrinsic barrier against unchecked environmental proliferation.
