Biosecurity for Genome Engineering: Safety First and the SeqScreen Solution for Functional Predictions

Bioengineering technologies hold enormous potential to solve many of our world’s pressing problems. However, they also pose biosecurity considerations. Inscripta^® is committed to safe use of its genome engineering technology and has implemented multi-faceted biosecurity system designed to identify and help prevent biorisk potential of engineered organisms. Drs. Ternus, Treangen, and Vitalis will describe approaches and challenges of genome engineering biosecurity and highlight a computational tool that can predict protein function of large numbers of engineered sequence variants. The SeqScreen platform was developed by a multi-institutional team led by Signature Science and Rice University under the IARPA Fun GCAT program. Case studies will illustrate how SeqScreen serves as a comprehensive tool to report features and predicted function of novel sequences arising from bioengineering.