Creating a Research Agenda for the Ecological Implications of Synthetic Biology

Synthetic biology is a field characterized by rapid rates of change and by the novelty, and breadth of applications. It is also an area of basic research and application that encompasses engineering along with the natural, physical, and social sciences. NSF’s Division of Cellular and Molecular Biology, the Division of Environmental Biology, and the Engineering Directorate provided support for the MIT Program on Emerging Technologies and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars to organize two workshops to identify potential ecological effects of synthetic biology applications and the critical areas of uncertainty associated with those ecological effects. Further the project aimed to define technical research priorities to develop tools and methods to evaluate the ecological effects of synthetic biology applications and to identify the scientific research priorities to improve understandings of and ways to mitigate those ecological effects. Projects on nitrogen fixation, gene drive propagation in wild populations, glowing plants, and bio-mining were used to seed discussions among synthetic biologists, natural and social scientists and regulators. The consensus among workshop participants was that establishing and sustaining multidisciplinary research groups would be needed to address the following priority research areas: comparators; phenotypic characterization; fitness, genetic stability, and lateral gene transfer; control of organismal traits; monitoring and surveillance; modeling; and standardization of methods and data. Addressing these complex questions and overcoming communications barriers across disciplines cannot be done on a short term basis. In addition a concomitant assessment of economic and social implications of applications would be necessary to provide a foundation for assessing ecological implications. Synthetic biology is poised to make non-incremental, transformative advances in basic and applied areas of research. To realize these goals a coordinated prioritized research strategy amongst various governmental agencies, academia and industry will be needed to identify and mitigate the ecological implications of synthetic biology.