Detail the safety and security considerations of your project, adressing potential risks and outlining the measures taken to mitigate them.
Synthetic biology will need to be used safely and securely if local people are to solve local problems all around the world. The Safety and Security Committee is challenging teams to apply biological engineering approaches to manage risks associated with synthetic biology. Can you take the next step in progress towards knowledge, understanding, and tools that will make the use of synthetic biology safer and more secure?
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Describe all potential safety and security risks associated with your project, including:
Explain how you are addressing these risks and implementing safety measures.
Detail any safety features incorporated into your project design, such as:
Explain the rationale behind these design choices.
Ensure that your project adheres to all safety requirements outlined in the Safety Policies page.
The section below is a separate, independently-written draft, produced by a team member outside the main documentation process. Kept here for reference and comparison; not yet fact-checked by team leadership.
The argument, in full: an engineered organism that processes plastic in a closed cabin only earns the right to exist if the containment story is airtight.
E. coli K-12 (MG1655) is a non-pathogenic biosafety-level-1 organism, a workhorse of molecular biology for roughly 70 years, with well-characterised escape and survival behaviour in the wild — notably auxotrophic for several common metabolites and a poor competitor outside the lab.
Two independent kill switches, both required to be off for cell viability, deliberately built on disjoint failure modes — one transcriptional (thermosensitive λ cI, triggered above 30°C, driving an SOS lethality response), one translational (EL222 light receptor controlling a colicin self-lysis cassette, triggered by 470 nm light) — so their joint failure rate is genuinely multiplicative rather than sharing a common weak point.
| Failure mode | Mitigation |
|---|---|
| Suppressor mutation in switch A | Switch B still active · joint containment OK |
| Suppressor mutation in switch B | Switch A still active · joint containment OK |
| Cartridge breach (mechanical) | Hard cartridge wall + redundant gaskets |
| Horizontal gene transfer | K-12 + low DNA-uptake environment + plasmid-only maintenance |
| Reactor escape during launch | Cartridge sealed pre-flight; switches active pre-flight |
All wet-lab work conducted at BSL-1, with full biosafety committee oversight, minimum PPE of gloves/goggles/lab coat, a spill protocol at every bench, autoclaving of all engineered-organism waste, and weekly safety walkthroughs.
A stated commitment: if a failure mode is identified during the season that can't be mitigated — particularly one suggesting horizontal gene transfer above background — the result would be published, the construct withdrawn from the Registry, and the project ended. Written down in advance, so nobody has to invent that decision under pressure.
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