Niko McCarty @NikoMcCarty
Niko McCarty. @NikoMcCarty · 11h
Lab leaks are extremely common, but usually benign.
Last month, I went to a conference in the UK. I was talking to some plant biologists who work with Arabidopsis thaliana, a weed in the mustard family. Arabidopsis seeds are tiny, like grains of pollen, and they stick to clothing. These seeds are often engineered with GFP, for example, such that they fluoresce green. And, being so small, they inevitably get carried (accidentally) outside the lab.
One plant biologist told me that that their lab group goes outside and picks all the Arabidopsis plants they can find in the areas around campus each year. They then bring these plants back into the laboratory and sequence them.
Last year, half of these "wild" plants had GFP.
[photos: left — tiny brown seeds next to a marker pen tip for scale; right — a seedling glowing green under fluorescence, showing GFP expression in the root/hypocotyl]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A biosecurity-adjacent tweet about routine, benign "lab leaks" — genetically engineered Arabidopsis plant seeds escaping into the wild environment around a research campus, illustrating how common (and low-stakes) unintentional biological containment breaches are. General science/biosecurity interest reading, tangential to but distinct from Nathan's dual-use biosecurity evals work.