Gold Integrated

Introduction

Follow up from the action plan, we developed a toolkit for engineering kill switch in an effort to address the issue of environmental and health safety concerns raised by our community from our human practice silver results. We have also introduced 2 basic guides to address the concern of a lack of standardised methodology in building a kill switch fail-safe for future iGEM teams to utilize and improve as well as build our genetic circuitry following some of the design considerations listed in the guides. The highlight of our library is that every constituent in the library of parts that we introduced is modular whereby a part/backbone can be conveniently substituted for another bit in our ever-expanding repository.

Development of framework

Apart from the extensive modelling support our team has incorporated into the design of this toolkit, NUSgem desires to create a user experience framework that addresses the fundamental problems in integrating the kill switch mechanism into the backbone to enable users to troubleshoot potential problems quickly and efficiently.

The strengths of the framework are:

Opensource & easily available: after registering relevant credentials, any member in field of synthetic biology is welcome to contribute his/her user-experience in the challenges faced in the design consideration aspect, genetic information to this toolkit
Peer-reviewed: fellow experts in the field of synthetic biology can validate one another’s user experience, provide solutions, all in one place.

Unfortunately, NUSgem experience in identifying potential obstacles that involve incorporating the kill switch technology into its host is limited. We initiated discussions with researchers from the Synthetic biology for Clinical & Technological Innovation (SynCTI) on potential challenges in incorporating kill switches into bacterial host to validate our framework (Table 1. and Table 2.) We also seized the opportunity to draft out a second framework that considers the possible failure of our kill switch in and out of the human body. This second framework (Table 3.) endeavours to remedy the environmental and health consumption concerns that were illustrated from our interactions with members of the public, conservationist and experts in the field of synthetic biology.

Table 1. Making kill switches easier to incorporate into bacteria host(part1)

Table 2. Making kill switches easier to incorporate into bacteria host(part2)

Table 3. Considerations for possible failure of kill switch

NUSgem has carefully considered both frameworks that we have developed before proceeding to create the parts in our experiments. These frameworks have helped shorten the design creation aspect of our kill switch. However, we did not manage to charactise all the possible problems listed in the framework due to shortage of time. Our team hope that both frameworks will serve as a basic guiding list for future kill switch gene circuit design considerations and for the scientific community to improve on both framework to create an even more extensive framework that can achieve our team's aim of making engineering kill switches easier!

Conclusion

NUSgem has developed 3 in 1 toolkit system comprising of 2 opensource frameworks alongside modelling methodology augmenting our experimental data to address the environmental and human health safety dangers that genetically engineered organisms post, as well as the lack of standardized methodology in integrating a kill switch safeguard into bacteria chassis. In terms of future work implementation, we hope to get this entire system online to facilitate an opensource, accessible repository to the world in alignment with the iGEM spirit and that our project will be a key milestone in paving the way to ensure a wide spectrum of futuristic applications that are environmental and health friendly.