Safeguarding the Bioeconomy (2020) / Chapter Skim
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1 Introduction
1 Introduction
Pages 17-38
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From page 17... ...
that has created them, are changing the face of many industries and stimulating economic activity.2 The term "bioeconomy," which has emerged over the past two decades as a way to conceptualize this economic activity, has differing attributions, and its meaning is continually evolving. Given that the term links biology and economic activity, moreover, its meaning differs across contexts and countries, reflecting the vast range of natural resources and technological strengths around the world.
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The Great Recession, a period of significant general economic decline in world markets in the late 2000s and early 2010s, nucleated a series of efforts in the United States to stimulate economic recovery. During this time, the 2009 National Research 3Any technological application that uses biological systems, living organisms, biological processes, or derivatives thereof, to make or modify products or processes for specific use.
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Specifically, agencies were advised to "support research to establish the foundations for a 21st century bio-economy" in areas in which "advances in biotechnology and improvements in our ability to design biological systems have the potential to address critical national needs in agriculture, energy, health and the environment." This specific reference to biotechnology as a key feature of the future U.S. bioeconomy was aligned with the strengths of the nation's public and private research sectors in cutting-edge engineering biology and big data approaches to harness the potential of biological research for addressing national-scale challenges.
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expanded efforts to enable the procurement of biobased products through the Bio Preferred Program,6 and the BioRefinery Assistance Program (rebranded as the Biorefinery, Renewable Chemical, and Biobased Product Manufacturing Assistance Program7) , and the Biomass Crop Assistance Program.8 • Major advances have occurred in engineering biology, including gene-editing approaches involving meganucleases, zinc fingers, transcription activator-like nucleases (TALENs)
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released its technical research roadmap, Engineering Biology: A Research Roadmap for the Next-Generation Bioeconomy,12 which out lines technical themes and application sectors for engineering biology. In addition to the previously mentioned 2009 NRC report A New Biology for the 21st Century, a number of more recent National Academies reports have elaborated specific sectors of biotechnology.
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A detailed discussion of other nations' approaches to defining their bioeconomies and organizing their bioeconomy strategies can be found in Chapter 2. The global bioeconomy, then, involves economic rivalry and cooperation among nations, in addition to significant scientific collaboration.
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Next-generation sequencing reduces the scale (size) of the sample, enabling massively parallel sequencing reactions -- the simultaneous sequencing and analysis of millions of oligonucleotides (short strings of DNA bases)
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. Companies such as 23andMe and Ancestry DNA utilize GWAS predictions to provide reports to their individual consumers on genetic disease risks or other characteristics with a genetic basis.
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. Metabolic engineering and engineering biology, enabled by new analytical capabilities, are poised to enable use of a national resource of more than a billion tons of lignocellulosic biomass (DOE, 2011, 2016)
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Efficient production of target compounds requires systems-level understanding of metabolism and constraints, including trade-offs between carbon fluxes and cellular energy balances. Distributed network control, genetic redundancy, compartmentation of metabolic activities, and multicellularity together increase metabolic complexity in plants, making the design–build–test–improve engineering cycle more challenging than is the case for microbial systems.
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Shifting from a system that depended on protein recognition of target DNA sequences to a system that depends on complementary DNA recognition of target DNA sequences simplified and resolved many of the underlying issues of molecular engineering. The rapidity of adoption of CRISPR/Cas9 by the research community is a function of the ease with which the technology can be used for the design of genetic modifications, the affordability of oligonucleotide synthesis, and the low cost of sequencing modified organisms.
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Red blood cells are short-lived and are continuously replaced by hematopoietic stem cells. Sickle cell disease is caused by a single base pair mutation in the beta-hemoglobin protein that reversibly binds oxygen in red blood cells.
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The four examples presented in the preceding section -- next-generation sequencing, analytical chemistry, epigenetics, and gene and genome editing -- are all powerful biotechnology tools that have accelerated the development of applications for the bioeconomy. Advances in biotechnology require experimentation: to bring a biotechnology drug to market requires millions of experiments, and the same is true for a biotechnology crop or a new detergent enzyme.
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Today, advanced computing techniques such as machine learning are dramatically accelerating the ability to observe nonobvious patterns in large, complex datasets; to make "wise guesses," eliminating improbable experiments; and to continue to pursue the most promising leads. Biological datasets can also be paired with data from disparate sources, such as medical clinical observations, plant-breeding records, workplace exposure data, family histories, and lifestyle information from social media.
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bioeconomy advances through the sharing of data and information and through collaboration among scientists around the world. Sharing works to build scientific expertise while also saving resources, enabling many researchers (in academia or industry, within or outside of the United States)
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bioeconomy, determining how to assess its economic value, identifying potential economic and national security risks related to the bioeconomy and associated policy gaps, considering cybersecurity solutions for protecting bioeconomy data and other outputs of the bioeconomy, and determining a mechanism for tracking future advances and developments within the bioeconomy. The committee's full Statement of Task is presented in Box 1-1.
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• Outline potential economic and national security risks and identify policy gaps pertaining to the collection, aggregation, analysis, and sharing of data and other outputs of the bioeconomy. • Consider whether there are unique features of the bioeconomy that may require innovative cybersecurity solutions.
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Chapter 4, on areas of leadership in the global economy, presents a detailed examination of the metrics commonly used to determine scientific and economic leadership within a domain. The metrics compared here include government investment in R&D, scientific output (captured in publications and patents)
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Chapter 7, on economic and national security risks pertaining to the bioeconomy, outlines the various risks related to the U.S. bioeconomy, although the committee notes that much of this discussion does not differentiate economic from national security risks, which often cannot be decoupled.
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2016. Pluripotent stem cells: The last 10 years.
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2017. Haematopoietic stem and progenitor cells from human pluripotent stem cells.
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https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/ files/documents/rural-prosperity-report.pdf (accessed October 21, 2019)
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