SafeChassis: Engineering biosafety for industrial biotechnology

Summary

Biotechnological innovations have the ability to stir a range of often conflicting societal responses, as different stakeholders perceive risks, benefits, harms, desirability, and necessity of new technologies in contrasting ways. As part of the SafeChassis project and the NWO Biotechnology and Safety programme, the work presented in this thesis responds to the need for an experimentalist approach in synthetic biology to achieve higher safety levels, and it does so by implementing and assessing genetic safeguards for lifestyle and metabolic engineering of industrial bacterial chassis. Beyond engineering different biocontainment strategies, I seized the opportunity to engage with numerous stakeholders and the Safety-by-Design approach with a special focus on biomanufacturing and industrial biotechnology. Thereby, I aimed to contribute to the development of the biosafety field by taking advantage of the immense potential of bioengineering and by exploring cross-cutting biosafety issues in the laboratory, the classroom, the regulatory and public sectors, and business.