Safety and Security Award

Our double safe (E² Safe) biocontainment system for the first time provides a new technical strategy to address the potential dual-use risks of cyanobacterial synthetic biology research without introducing any exogenous chemical inducer. This system not only takes traditional strategy of killing into its design, but also utilizing the mobility arresting as novel strategy to stop cell dissemination in nature before the death of the cyanobacteria. These designs make the engineered cyanobacteria developed by our team in this iGEM project a very secure platform for synthetic biology at this moment. The results of our escape experiments (see results in web lab and dry lab) have proved the high efficiency of biocontainment of our system. Fully achieving biosafety standard proposed by the NIH (10^-8).

In addition to the construction of a more secure technical platform, our team also actively engaged with the society and the real world regarding its application and concept of safe synthetic biology within the project. We hope that our efforts in this iGEM project can raise public awareness of the importance of biosafety. Therefore, our team organized a series of human practice activities to disseminate the information about biosafety.

During the 11th Conference of China iGEMer Community Conference July 2024 in Suzhou, our team made a poster to advocate the challenges and relevant policies for biosecurity and then delivered the printed versions of the poster to more than 100 conference participants. We also set an exhibition board in the conference hall to introduce our poster to the participants passing by (Figure 1). Another poster in English has already been made and will be brought to the iGEM Grand Jamboree in Paris (Figure 5).

Our team also introduced our biocontainment system to other iGEM teams for cooperation opportunities, in order to promote the application of our more secure platform for chassis organisms in more projects in synthetic biology (Figure 2). We got positive reply from them and found it was valuable and possible to apply our biocontainment system in more chassis organisms.

Figure 1. Introduce and deliver our poster to participants during the 11th Conference of China iGEMer Community Conference 2024 in Suzhou, China.

Figure 2. introduce our biocontainment system to other iGEM teams and attending experts in synthetic biology during the 11th Conference of China iGEMer Community Conference 2024 in Suzhou.

Our teams also invited the law professor Yang Xue at Tianjin University Law School and Center for Biosafety Research and Strategy to discuss the law and policies against the potential risks in biosecurity (Figure 3). On one hand, this discussion provided us more information about the law affairs about biosecurity and the challenges for policy-making. On the other hand, we realized that our newly-developed technique could be useful information and might be able to promote the law- and policy-making in world wide.

Figure 3. Discussion about the policies about biosecurity with law expert.

We also realized that young generation of researchers should shoulder more responsibilities to maintain biosafety during the research in the future. Our team organized science popularization lectures at several different high schools in Beijing to introduce the importance of biosafety and the results of our project to the peer high schoolers of our team members (Figure 4). In order to bring more interest in our lectures, we also designed some interaction games with the audience. The participants in these lectures gave us very positive feedback. Most of them told us that they knew the mechanisms behind the risks of biosafety for the first time and the so fascinated with the synthetic biology techniques. Some students developed very high interest in synthetic biology after listening to our lectures. All these activities and feedback made us more confident with our technic and advocating efforts. We hope that we can continue working and optimizing our biocontainment system in the coming years. We also promise ourselves that we will practice our slogan “Science for Nature and Humanity” throughout in the future research.

Figure 4. Science popularization lectures to the peer high schoolers of our team members.

During the 2024 iGEM Grand Jamboree in Paris, our team plan to present a poster and statement entitled as “Responsible Synthetic Biology for Nature and Humanity – Action from Youth”. Our team will re-state that scientists are at the frontier of synthetic biology innovation, and also the first line of defense against technology misuse and abuse (Figure 5). Therefore, to prevent the misuse and abuse of dual-use synthetic biology, it is essential to enhance the awareness and engagement of scientific community on biosafety issues and to reinforce the moral self-discipline of the scientific community. The team will introduce to all iGEM contesters (young generation scientists) several initiatives that have articulated ethical principles and toolkits to harness the power of science and innovation, including WHO's 2022 Global Guidance Framework for the Responsible Use of the Life Sciences highlighted the concept that scientists constitute the first line of control for assessing, preventing, and mitigating risks, explaining that they have a professional responsibility to consider and mitigate risks that stem from the knowledge, products, or technologies that they develop; and the Tianjin Biosecurity Guidelines for Codes for Scientists that also identified a set of 10 guiding principles and standards of conduct for scientists to promote responsible science practice and strengthen biosecurity governance at various levels.

Figure 5. The poster about biosecurity that we will display in the Jamboree.