Gómez-Tatay Lucía, Hernández-Andreu José Miguel
Institute of Life Sciences, Universidad Católica de Valencia San Vicente Mártir, 46001 Valencia, Spain.
Grupo de Investigación en Medicina Molecular y Mitocondrial, Universidad Católica de Valencia San Vicente Mártir, 46001 Valencia, Spain.
Life (Basel). 2024 Aug 10;14(8):996. doi: 10.3390/life14080996.
Since the development of recombinant DNA technologies, the need to establish biosafety and biosecurity measures to control genetically modified organisms has been clear. Auxotrophies, or conditional suicide switches, have been used as firewalls to avoid horizontal or vertical gene transfer, but their efficacy has important limitations. The use of xenobiological systems has been proposed as the ultimate biosafety tool to circumvent biosafety problems in genetically modified organisms. Xenobiology is a subfield of Synthetic Biology that aims to construct orthogonal biological systems based on alternative biochemistries. Establishing true orthogonality in cell-based or cell-free systems promises to improve and assure that we can progress in synthetic biology safely. Although a wide array of strategies for orthogonal genetic systems have been tested, the construction of a host harboring fully orthogonal genetic system, with all parts operating in an orchestrated, integrated, and controlled manner, still poses an extraordinary challenge for researchers. In this study, we have performed a thorough review of the current literature to present the main advances in the use of xenobiology as a strategy for biocontainment, expanding on the opportunities and challenges of this field of research.
自从重组DNA技术发展以来，建立生物安全和生物安保措施以控制转基因生物的必要性就已明确。营养缺陷型或条件性自杀开关已被用作防火墙，以避免水平或垂直基因转移，但其功效存在重要局限性。有人提出使用异源生物学系统作为最终的生物安全工具，以规避转基因生物中的生物安全问题。异源生物学是合成生物学的一个子领域，旨在基于替代生物化学构建正交生物系统。在基于细胞或无细胞系统中建立真正的正交性有望改进并确保我们能够安全地在合成生物学领域取得进展。尽管已经测试了大量用于正交遗传系统的策略，但构建一个拥有完全正交遗传系统的宿主，使所有部件以协调、整合和可控的方式运行，对研究人员来说仍然是一项巨大的挑战。在本研究中，我们对当前文献进行了全面综述，以介绍将异源生物学用作生物遏制策略的主要进展，并阐述该研究领域的机遇和挑战。
