The Workshop On Biosafety Of Synthetic Biolology Held In Institute Of Botany---Chinese Academy Of Sciences

The Sino-Austria workshop on biosafety of synthetic biology was held in the Institute of Botany, CAS on January 20th, 2010. The participants of the workshop were the researchers from universities around China and different institutes of CAS (IOB) together with the project leaders from the two cooperative institutes.

This workshop is part of activities of the cooperative project "Collaboration study on the biosafety and risk assessment of synthetic biology between Austria and China” which has been co-funded by Austrian Science Fund (FWF grant no. I215-B17) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). The aims of this cooperation are to investigate the future needs of biosafety management of synthetic biology and to promote the cooperation between China and Europe.

Synthetic biology is an emerging scientific research area, which has potential applications in many aspects of natural science. It is a multiple disciplinary science of which biology, chemistry and physics are combined. It is about to design and synthesize biological system on molecular level to improve quality of life and health and to promote biosafety. The biosafety and risk assessment to synthetic biology may bring new needs to the current ones.

The morning section of the workshop was hosted by Dr. WEI Wei from IOB. First, Dr. PEI Lei from IDC gave an introduction on the definitions of synthetic biology and subfields, aiming to provide some basic concepts on this research field. Then Dr. Markus SCHMIDT from IDC and Prof. CHEN Guoqiang from Tsinghua University gave talks on the overview of synthetic biology in EU as well as in China respectively, aiming to find mutual interest and possible cooperation.

To provide a better understanding on biosafety related issues of synthetic biology, Dr. Markus SCHMIDT gave a talk on overview of biosafety, security & risk assessment challenges for Synbio. Several key questions were brought up by this talk:

1). Are there new needs on risk assessment for synthetic biology?

2). Can the implements of synthetic biology make the genetic engineering safer?

3). Facing the simplicity of synthetic biology, how to deal with the do-it-self used by non professionals?

All of these are also the challenges that lie ahead in the research area of synthetic biology.