Contributions

Our team built a temperature sensing biocontainment system to prevent leakage of biosynthetic chassis organisms to the environment to ensure that the engineered cyanobacteria are not able to survive under non-permissive conditions, such as natural environments with night temperature typically below 30℃, but grow normally under laboratory conditions (37℃). This system avoids the addition of any exogenous chemical inducer, not only cutting down the cost but also decease any secondary chemical contamination. Escape experiments conducted under both laboratory conditions and stimulated natural pond conditions in Tianjin, China demonstrated that the system has successfully achieved biocontainment with survival rates below the standard proposed by the National Institute of Health (NIH) guidelines for organisms containing recombinant DNA molecules (10⁻⁸). Finally, the strategy we developed could also be implemented in many other bacterial chasses readily with minor modification.