Team:UNebraska-Lincoln/Integrated Practices
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
Integrated Human Practices
Since the inception of the project, we aimed to provide a scientifically feasible and practically safe solution to managing the nitrogen cycle. One that can be applied to the natural environment. We designed and installed a novel kill-switch that leads to the death of our machine once the concentration of nitrate is reduced below the safety level. Over the summer, we met with scientists from local biotech companies and fellow iGEMers to discuss both the scientific and safety aspects our project design. Based on the feedback, we became more mindful of safety and began to integrate an interdisciplinary tool to our project. We developed safety cases, a method that is currently used to gauge the safety of critical software systems to simulate the end-results of releasing our engineered microorganisms into the environment.
It is an exciting time for the field of Synthetic Biology (SB). The increased efficacy of computational modeling and the increased cost effectiveness, performance, and efficiency of molecular biology techniques, such as synthesis and sequencing of nucleic acids has contributed to a rapid advancement in SB. In the foreseeable future, more and more complex synthetic biology systems will be possible, and the opportunities of SB will vastly expand. In fact, synthetic biology has now reached the commercial stage. According to a report by Allied Market Research, the global synthetic biology market is forecast to reach $38.7 billion by 2020, which is a growth of about 44.2% from 2014 to 2020 (“Synthetic Biology Market - Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecasts, 2014 - 2020"). Our team has become very concerned with safety within SB. Biosafety concerns are one key restraining factor for growth of the field. The initial engineering of organisms was to see if it was possible. Many SB solutions to real world problems are now clearly possible and the practicality of implementing such solutions is becoming more evident. Now that the field has reached a new level of maturity, it is imperative that those involved in SB gain a new level of responsibility regarding safety/environmental impacts of engineered SB solutions. We propose the use of safety assurance cases to more fully address the safety and environmental concerns of introducing engineered microorganisms outside of the lab. We envision this highly interdisciplinary application as a powerful platform to be used extensively in SB. Our team has developed a safety case for our kill switch to increase our awareness of our project’s impact on the environment and begin to address these concerns. Furthermore, our team has outlined foundational information on safety cases, as well as, further developed our vision for integrating this tool into the iGEM competition and the field of synthetic biology as a whole.Introduction:
Want to see more outreach?
