FIGURE 1.

Understanding the hazard posed by bioengineering requires the characterization of hazardous building blocks. Bioengineering enables the creation of novel or modified organisms through oligonucleotide synthesis and assembly of building blocks within a biological vehicle. These biological functional building blocks are inspired from sequences extracted and sequenced from natural organisms. Such organisms can be composed of hazardous and non-hazardous functional elements (denoted by the red and blue blocks, respectively). The hazardous functions within organisms may have arisen from environmental selective pressures such as virus mutation to enable, for example, a jump from a vector to a human host, or a transfer of transposable elements among species.