Anthrax, Ebola, and smallpox are all dangerous pathogens that belong to a list of so-called select agents whose handling and storage are subject to special government regulations. But what about synthetically designed genomes that could be potentially as deadly as known pathogens?
The way to bring such unknown entities under regulation, according to a new National Academies report issued today, is to develop a new system of defining select agents based on DNA sequences. "That would provide a very sharp, bright line" to help gene-synthesis companies and their clients decide if a genomic sequence "meets the definition of a select agent or not," says Sean Eddy, a biologist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, and one of the report's authors.
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