This table shows the relationship between specific ideas, concerns, or advice expressed to us by interviewees about our project and how our team responded through modification of project design, experimental methods and plans, and human practices deliverables. Only individuals that had distinct comments specifically about our project are included in our table. However, many other individuals influenced our thinking and approach to biocontainment both in our project and our human practices deliverables. Please visit the Interviews pages to learn more about those that we discussed our ideas with.
| Person Spoken To |
Advice/Concerns about Project or Human Practices |
Our Response |
| Hank Greely |
- How many base pairs can CRISPR handle?
- Why use it with other amino acids?
- How would the project be regulated?
- Is Horizontal Gene Transfer between our organism and others possible in the environment?
- What is our ultimate plan after iGEM?
|
- Spoke with CRISPR experts
- Decided that expanding our biocontainment system to include other amino acids was not necessary, but considered the possibility of using a mutant tRNA of another organism as a back-up
- Turned our attention to regulatory agencies (FDA, EPA, USDA) as well as other companies
- Discussed the threat of HGT negating our system and researched methods to prevent this from occurring, that would ideally be translatable to other organisms
- Discussed the threat of our biocontainment system being transferred into other organisms; Decided to use CRISPR to edit the genome rather than insert the mutant on a plasmid to reduce risk of HGT
|
| Nick Evans |
- Ideally, there should be a system to track the bugs/vulnerabilities in all the organisms and send out “patch”
- How can our system could be hacked?
- Cost and reliability are most important for marketability of the project
- Can the contained organism survive long enough to accomplish task in an environment without protected leucine? (If toxic, how long would it take to produce the toxin?)
|
- Discussed the creation of an electronic reporting system to detect problems with our biocontainment system; discussed sustainability of such an approach due to the ephemeral nature of iGEM teams
- Made plans to implement a back-up kill switch linked to a reporter so that the reporter is produced upon system failure
- Considered ways in which our biocontainment method could be used for ill intent, and decided that these risks were fairly low
- Made plans to quantify the survival rate of the contained organism in liquid culture without protected-leucine
- Made plans to measure protein output of these cells over time
|
| Markus Gershater (Synthace) |
- Will our method be better than physical containment (which is 100% efficient)?
- What is the measure of success?
- How easily can the genetic construct get out?
- What will it take to break down our system?
- What characterizations will be made about our system to ensure ours is sufficient?
- What level of effectiveness would be sufficient for industry to adopt?
- Must expose our system to different conditions/environments to confirm effectiveness
- Recommended contacting companies that create GMOs for real-world usage
- Will our technology have dual-use and how will we address that?
- What would it take to change your project/what modifications would you be willing to make to your project?
|
- Discussed the need for our biocontainment method and decided that our method will not be marketed towards industries or fields that can effectively utilize physical containment; rather, the purpose of our method is utilization in open areas where physical containment is impossible
- Defined our measure of success as surviving in the presence of Pro-Leu and dying in the absence of Pro-Leu with an escapee propagation rate that is lower than other published methods (i.e. kill switch, NSAA, etc)
- Qualitative and quantitative measures
- Sequence the genome of colonies that escaped and determine the mutation and its effect
- Decided to test our system in different environments to determine which one our system could best succeed in
- Leu-derivable systems
- Different temperatures
- Different pH
- Soil and water
- Discussed designing experiments to define in what environments and conditions our system works and its relative efficiency in each
|
| Rivanna |
- Uses naturally-occurring organisms that are immediately killed with UV light before the water is released, but expressed interest in our method if they were to employ GEOs
|
- Since Rivanna doesn’t currently use GEOs and has an extremely effective physical containment system, we decided that our containment system may not be best suited for this company
|
| Monsanto |
- Problems to overcome with implementing in a plant chassis:
- Plant metabolism is really fast
- How would the plant uptake the protected amino acid?
- How much would you need? (cost)
- Why would it be better than physical containment?
- Currently undertaking projects in insecticides that use GEOs for its production
- Interested in our method as an extra layer of biosecurity in the laboratory setting due to the production of toxins by these GEOs
|
- Considered uptake of protected leucine through plant roots
- Decided that agriculture may be a future direction of our project, but currently our method is not developed enough to pursue this route
- Decided that there is a market for our method not only in open environments, but also in certain laboratory settings; Influenced the team to pursue a partnership with Open Bio Labs
- Planned to conduct cost-benefit analysis based on the costs of our project
- Plant (farm)
- Body of water
- Industrial scale
|
| Green Biologics |
- What is the cost of protected leucine?
- What is the cost of process (transformation)?
- How can you streamline the process?
|
- Decided to produce a Business Plan
|
