Team:Bilkent UNAM Turkey/safety

SAFETY AND SECURITY QUESTIONS

1. Would the materials used in your project and/or your final product pose:

a. Risks to the safety and health of team members or others in the lab?
Using hazardous materials always has risk to cause trouble for team and lab members. We always
use hoods and wearing lab coat, gloves, goggles are essential for an experiment.
We are working on two species one of them is Chlamydomonas reinhardtii which has no dangerous
effect on human health.

b. Risks to the safety and health of the general public if released by design or accident?
Chlamydomonas reinhardtii is a strain of algae and it can cause algal bloom that means it
overgrows in a water ecosystem and becomes poisonous for other species which live in same places.

c. Risks to environmental quality if released by design or accident?
We have not checked modified organism is more competitive than natural strains in normal condition.
However, in TNT contaminated soil or water, modified alg is expected to live more competetively.

d. Risks to security through malicious misuse by individuals, groups or states?
Our modified Chlamydomonas reinhardtii just degrade TNT and it could not use for terrorism
activity. Those two modified organism could not have ability to damage human health. Our facility
always has an active security system and it requires an identity card for enterance.

2.Please explain your responses (whether yes or no) to these questions.

Specifically, are any parts or devices in your project associated with (or known to cause):
- pathogenicity, infectivity, or toxicity?
No
- threats to environmental quality?
No
- security concerns?
No

a. Explain how you addressed these issues in project design and while conducting laboratory work.
Algal species, including Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, are capable of causing wide-scale bloom events known
colloquially as red tides, with severe negative consequences to freshwater and marine environs.
Therefore, the algal strains used in our project are an environmental risk. Consequently, they are treated
as biological hazardous waste. All biological waste is disposed of according to standards of
the National Nanotechnology Research Center (UNAM). Briefly, cells were killed via 5% bleach and disposed to
a waste storage allocated for biological contaminants.

b. Describe and document safety, security, health and/or environmental issues as you submit your
parts to the Registry.
Our parts have not any safety, security and health issues. However, adding nfsI gene into algae
could make it more competitive than normal strains. It requires checking before releasing to
nature.

3. Under what biosafety provisions will / do you operate?

a. Does your institution have its own biosafety rules and if so what are they? Provide a link to
them online if possible.
Our institution have its own biosafety rules and it takes 19 page so we added a link below which
leads to institution’s safety committee page and it contains two link; one of them orientation
of our lab and other one is chemical disposal form.
http://unam.bilkent.edu.tr/UNAM%20Laboratory%20Safety.html

b. Does your institution have an Institutional Biosafety Committee or equivalent group? If yes,
have you discussed your project with them? Describe any concerns or changes that were made based
on this review.
We have a Laboratory Safety Committee; however, we did not discuss about our project because our
experiment contains standard cloning procedure, which has always done in the lab.

c. Will / did you receive any biosafety and/or lab training before beginning your project? If
so, describe this training.
All team members participated in a short course on biosafety measures and were subsequently
administered a written test to evaluate their capacity to react to common laboratory accidents. Particularly relevant
to our project is the part concerning correct handling of carcinogens and procedures in case of their spillage,
as our project foresees no use of radioactive, highly combustible or strongly oxidizing materials (though training
on safety protocols regarding those hazards was also provided).

d. Does your country have national biosafety regulations or guidelines? If so, provide a link to
them online if possible.
http://www.unep.org/biosafety/files/TRNBFrep.pdf