Safety and Human Practices

Outlook

An ambitious system we want to design for security is an artificial black box which people should work with by keys. The general idea to get the information from a working system is extracting the plasmid from the bacteria and sequencing the working parts. In this way, there will be less security. The bacteria will be a white box for everyone who gets it. Here the black boxes are necessary for the proteins or plasmids that may be harmful. So we are trying to design a bacteria that not easy to work and be extracted and sequenced.

The first step, the controllable lysis system are introduced in the bacteria. And an operator system is employed as a switch to the lysis system. The lysis system will start without the ligand. A large library of specific interacting protein-ligand pairs with one template operator system can be built with computational design and directed evolution. In this way, only the owners of the bacteria know what the key is. So the bacteria itself will not grow and work, and at the same time the information of DNA is also destroyed by the lysis system. Our software can give a regulatory network to make the operator system stably open and close the lysis system.

The second step, the plasmid is restricted to work in the specific bacteria only, as it is hard to block the process of plasmid extraction and transform. A library of tRNA synthetases is necessary to change the translating processes to make the plasmid can not work in other bacteria. In this way, it is necessary to construct a platform to select tRNA synthetases mutation. A cell-free system is necessary, as the mutation may lead to the chaos of whole cell. And a time-dependent protein expression system can be designed by our software. And the plasmid can only working in a ligand-controlled specific cell environment.

In this way, we can construct a new platform to protect some harmful or potential harmful genes or systems.

Q & A

1. Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of:
   • researcher safety,
   • public safety, or
   • environmental safety?
2. Is there a local biosafety group, committee, or review board at your institution?
3. What does your local biosafety group think about your project?
4. Do any of the new BioBrick parts that you made this year raise any safety issues?
   • If yes, did you document these issues in the Registry?