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Risks and benefits
Under Good Microbiological Practices the risk of working with the BioBrick system is rather small to the worker. When the system would be released into the surroundings, there’s a small risk that it enters a pathogenic host organism that relies on quorum sensing in its pathogenicity.
Though the effects can’t have been studied yet, so unforeseen hazards might turn up. A robust biological oscillator that could be integrated into more complex genetic circuits would be of great utility for more advanced synthetic biology applications, especially related to quorum sensing – while this ability also can be very useful. One can envision the oscillator as a core component of a system sequentially performing specific enzymatic reactions.
Based on these considerations, we conclude that the potential benefits in successfully executing our project outweighs the estimated risks.
