Draft:Intrinsic biocontainment

Intrinsic biocontainment, also called genetic biocontainment, is the proactive design of functionalities or deficiencies into organisms and systems to reduce the hazards. It is unique to engineered organisms such as GMOs and synthetic organisms, and is an example of hazard substitution and of prevention through design.

Intrinsic biocontainment can have many goals, including controlling growth in the laboratory or after an unintentional release, preventing horizontal gene transfer to natural cells, preventing use for bioterrorism, or protecting the intellectual property of the organism's designers. There has been concern that existing genetic safeguards are not reliable enough due to the organism's ability to lose them through mutation. However, they may be useful in combination with other hazard controls, and may provide enhanced protections relative to GMOs.

Whole-organism containment
Some techniques seek to contain entire organisms.

Auxotrophy is the inability of an organism to synthesize a particular compound required for its growth, meaning that the organism cannot survive unless the compound is provided to it.

A kill switch is a pathway that initiates cell death that is triggered by a signal from humans.

Inability of the organisms to replicate is another such method. The use of self-inactivating viral vectors is another technique.

Gene transfer containment
Methods specific to plants include cytoplasmic male sterility, where viable pollen cannot be produced; and transplastomic plants where modifications are made only to the chloroplast DNA, which is not incorporated into pollen.

Methods specific to viral vectors include splitting key components between multiple plasmids.

It has been speculated that xenobiology, the use of alternative biochemistry that differs from natural DNA and proteins, may enable novel intrinsic biocontainment methods that are not possible with traditional GMOs. This would involve engineering organisms that use artificial xeno nucleic acids (XNA) instead of DNA and RNA, or that have an altered or expanded genetic code. These would be theoretically incapable of horizontal gene transfer to natural cells. There is speculation that these methods may have lower failure rates than traditional methods.

Health impacts
Omitting accessory proteins related to the wild-type virus' function as a pathogen but not as a vector is one technique.

Assessment
NIH guideline