Safety

Safety is at the centre of everything that we do. We have a responsibility to protect our own welfare, but also (as a GM lab) to ensure that we don’t accidentally change the world.

Our approach

Most of our safety procedures have been based upon existing safety frameworks that have been used within the Cambridge University Department of Plant Sciences; and experimentation is conducted under the supervision of technical experts. There are some aspects of our project which have required further thought, as it does not correspond to any existing frameworks.

Case Study: Avoiding Gene Drive

The release of any GM plant to the environment is obviously not good news, but the releasing a gene drive is especially bad. Our unique approach to using self-expressing cas9 (subject to design), is intended to propagate throughout the chloroplast genome. There is an inherent risk, that this propagation may spread to the greater alae population.

We are of course careful to implement various protection methods as may be required. This does of course start with safe containment -- but ‘kill switches’ and methods to prevent sexual reproduction have also been considered.