Chunyang Zhan

Hainan Institute of Biotechnology, Haikou, 570206, Hainan, China
Author    Correspondence author
GMO Biosafety Research, 2024, Vol. 15, No. 6   
Received: 04 Oct., 2024    Accepted: 06 Nov., 2024    Published: 16 Nov., 2024

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

As an innovative biotechnology tool, synthetic microbial communities have shown great potential in agricul-ture, medicine and industry. This study summarizes the existing biosafety assessment methods and technical means for synthetic microbial communities, analyzes the current status and shortcomings of the standardized assessment framework, and explores the future direction of promoting biosafety management through inter-national cooperation and technological innovation. The study found that environmental diffusion, gene trans-fer, host toxicity and mutation risk are key factors affecting the controllability and stability of synthetic mi-crobial communities; environmental monitoring, host toxicity experiments, gene transfer analysis and long-term evolution testing are core assessment methods, but the synergy between different technologies is not sufficient. At the same time, the current biosafety assessment framework lacks specificity and urgently needs to integrate key indicators such as stability, toxicity and controllability to establish a unified interna-tional assessment standard. This study provides comprehensive technical and theoretical support for the bi-osafety management of synthetic microbial communities, emphasizing the importance of international coop-eration, technological innovation and legal framework. By standardizing the assessment process and devel-oping new management tools, the safe application of synthetic microbial technology can be promoted while reducing its potential ecological and social risks.

Synthetic microbial communities; Biosafety assessment; Gene transfer; Environmental monitoring; Standardized framework