Team:VT-ENSIMAG Biosecurity

Name: Olivier Mirat Email: mirato@ensimag.fr Concentration: Computer Science/Math Masters student (Mathematical modeling, images, simulation; option Bioinformatics) School: ENSIMAG

Name: Gaelle Letort Email: gaelle.letort.gl@gmail.com) Concentration: Computer Science/Math Masters student (Mathematical modeling, images, simulation; option Bioinformatics) School: ENSIMAG

Name: Arunima Srivastava Email: arunima.srivastava1@gmail.com Concentration: Computer Science Undergraduate School: Virginia Tech

Name: Michael Kozar Email: mkozar07@vt.edu Concentration: Biochemistry/French Undergraduate School: Virginia Tech

Name: Tyler Stewart Email: stewartt@vbi.vt.edu Concentration: Biology/Biochemistry Undergraduate School: Virginia Tech

We are the VT-ENSIMAG biosecurity team, linking both Virginia Tech and ENSIMAG and hosted at Virginia Tech(VT) by the synthetic biology group at Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (VBI).

VT (http://www.vt.edu/about/) is located at Blacksburg, VA (USA) where 30,000+ students study in one of the nine colleges and grad school.

VBI (https://www.vbi.vt.edu/about_vbi/) is a research institute dedicated to the study of the biological sciences at Virginia Tech. By using bioinformatics, which combines transdisciplinary approaches to information technology and biology, researchers at VBI interpret and apply vast amounts of biological data generated from basic research to some of today¿s key challenges in the biomedical, environmental and agricultural sciences.

ENSIMAG (http://ensimag.grenoble-inp.fr/) is located in Grenoble (FRANCE). It is a top French educational institution in informatics, applied mathematics and telecommunications, pioneer in the field of information processing. Ensimag students stay three years in this engineering school where they finish their BS (students had already prepared for two years the admission exam to the ENSIMAG school in another institution) and get a master degree in CS and applied math (plus specialization).

Synthetic biology group (https://www.vbi.vt.edu/faculty/research_groups/synthetic_biology) where researches focus around Computer Assisted Design of synthetic genetic systems, Linguistic models of biological sequences, Stochastic dynamics of the yeast cell cycle and Quantitative imaging.

The rapid development technologies to chemically synthesize long DNA molecules has great potential to be used to generate existing or engineered organisms that could threaten public health. This possibility has been well illustrated by the synthesis of the strain of influenza virus responsible for the 1918 pandemic. The possibility to order for a few hundred dollars, genes coding for deadly toxins or entire genomes of viral pathogens calls for the development of new biosecurity policies. To reduce the risk that individuals with ill intent may exploit the commercial application of nucleic acid synthesis technology to access genetic material derived from or encoding select agents or toxins, we are proposing to implement the sequence screening algorithm, characterize its performance, and propose better screening algorithms.

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