Team:Marburg/Killswitch
Killswitch Database
The field of Synthetic Biology provides a large toolbox of methods and procedures towards the engineering of organisms with unique abilities which we make use of in various ways, for example by taking advantage of their production efficiency in biotechnology or by devoting them as tools for research. However, both approaches have in common that the success stories of these organisms have started in a petri dish in a lab, an area enabling us to work under controlled conditions. Especially, the evolutionary capabilities of bacteria have facilitated those to survive in almost any conceivable surrounding which delegates responsibility to us in terms of biosafety, in order to assure that a possible escape of the generated organisms from the lab does no harm to the outside world.
Therefore, in the past years, several iGEM teams did their best to design a killswitch, a genetically engineered circuit based conditioning of the organism on gene inducing or repressing signals to survive in the lab, but not outside of it. Since science relies on both, documentation and analysis of data to make progress, our team decided to summarize the available information of all killswitches designed since 2011 resulting in a killswitch database. Here we show the fast and efficient provision of information considering the killswitch database by using the example of a statistical analysis of the participating iGEM teams in correlation with the number and features of designed killswitches.
A synopsis of the participating teams in total from every continent and those which provided a killswitch reveals that especially the teams in North America, Asia and Europe increased their interest in biosafety (Fig. 1A, C, F). At the same time, the analysis illustrates a higher average number of participating teams from those continents which indicates a more prominent iGEM community there as well. On the other hand, Africa, South America and Oceania sent a fractional part of teams in relation to the already mentioned continents (Fig. 1B, D, E).
Taking the number of killswitches worldwide into account, normalized to the total number of teams, an increase within the past 4 years becomes obvious. As illustrated in Figure 2, the number of killswitches duplicated during that period of time.
