Fig. 3

Biosafety defense level. Assuming that physical containment fails, and the engineered bacteria escape their designated environment (e.g. a bioreactor), there are two ways possibly leading to a total biosafety system collapse. A biosafety collapse happens once either HGT or VGT (reproduction) occurs. Therefore, transfer of genetic information from the engineered cell to a wildtype cell can only occur if all mechanisms preventing either HGT or VGT, respectively, fail