Any synthetic biology project, especially if aimed at a larger and inexperienced audience, is bound to face the issue of safety. Our team has thoroughly considered the implications and questions our project is likely to give rise to on this specific topic.

First of all, Marchantia polymorpha is an ideal chassis for such a high-impact project. Besides the clear advantages this organism offers to a ‘biosensor for the people’ – outlined in the Overview section; it also represents an innocuous organism. The first safety-related issue one may ask is whether mösbi can be used for bioterrorism. After giving serious thought to this question, we have unanimously agreed the answer is no. Firstly, and individual prone to bioterrorism requires an in-depth knowledge of genetic engineering and molecular biology techniques – both aspects that cannot be acquired purely through using mösbi. Secondly, the development of any potentially hazardous modules and their release to the mösbi market would require inspection by a central quality control service (think of this like a better version of the Apple Store). If any doubts about the harmful nature arose during the quality control, the modules would be immediately banned and the creator legally persecuted. Furthermore, our chassis does not represent the ‘optimal’ bioterrorism platform – the transformation cycles, growth and ease of spread are significantly lower compared to bacteria or viral platforms. Therefore, to conclude, we believe our platform would not represent any danger to society in terms of misuse, such as bioterrorism.

A crucial component of the mösbi framework is the use of antibiotic resistance cassettes in each module. These allow for the selection of the assembled biosensors after crossing seed lines. However – the ever increasing antibiotic resistance of pathogens an enormous challenge to modern science and medicine. As the creators of an educational and useful platform we do not want to contribute to the spread of antibiotic resistance due to misuse of antibiotics – yet our project is entirely dependent on them.

The solution for controlling the use of antibiotics by an inexperienced audience came to us suddenly whilst admiring the packaging in which laboratory consumables got delivered to our lab. In theory – the company behind distributing mösbi seed lines would provide antibiotic-infused growth medium petri plates with each order of seed lines or specifically on demand. In this way, the need to create antibiotic plates – and thus the likelihood of antibiotic misuse; is removed from the end user.

Disposal of the plates would through still pose a problem. This can be easily solved by including a freepost return label to the packet by which the antibiotic plate is delivered to the user. After selecting for the progeny of a cross and transferring little mösbi plants to a general growth medium, the plate could easily be returned by post back to the provider and disposed of accordingly to regulations in order to avoid release of unnecessary antibiotics into the environment.

A common issue when dealing with transgenic organisms is considering the scenario of the organism escaping from a controlled environment – in most cases, the lab. However mösbi is distributed to a larger audience, who may fail to understand what the release of a transgenic organism may cause to the environment. This issue can be approached from various points. First and foremost, it is important to educate mösbi users on the potential implications of releasing their biosensors into the wild. This can be done through a user manual, which would in addition outline Marchantia care and crossing guidelines. Secondly, transgenic mösbi plants are unlikely to pose a threat to the wild-type Marchantia polymorpha population purely on the fact that the genetic modifications used in mösbi are likely to reduce the overall fitness of the plant, rather than increase it.

The key approach our team would have undertaken (had we had more time) would be to look into engineering an auxotrophic Marchantia plant line. The plant should require a specific compound in order to grow. The compound in question would be supplied through soil – produced and sold by the company behind mösbi. In this way biocontainment and revenue for the company could be maintained.

Other safety measures have been considered but later discarded due to interfering with the nature of the mösbi project. For example, the easiest way to ensure biocontainment would be through knocking out a gene(s) involved in spore formation. In this way, mösbi plants would be very unlikely to escape the comfort of ones home - however this would interfere with the production of spores required for biosensors assembly. Even if the assembly issue could be overcome, the inability to let an assembled biosensor form spores would prevent easy distribution and over-time storage.