Team:Wageningen UR/Safety/Three

Accidental release to the environment

There are several scenarios in which unintentional release of genetically modified material could take place.

Labeling of the lab equipment and glassware used is necessary to prevent loss and improper waste disposal by a fellow researcher. The following problems are not as easy to prevent.

The air filtering system will have a hard time in keeping aerosols in the lab when a window gets broken. If this happens through a thunderstorm, an electricity break-down is not unlikely and would increase the chance of release furthermore. Under Good Microbial Practice, though, the formation of aerosols is prevented as much as possible, thus the combination of these probabilities leaves a total probability that is not that high.

In transport from one end of the lab to the other, there is however a chance the transporter falls and cuts themself with the broken glassware containing hazardous biological material. Infection is a high probability in this case. For our project prophylaxes would be available, which reduce the chance on the development of a disease.

It should furthermore be reported to the Minister of ‘Housing Spatial Planning and the Environment’ and, involved, institutions and direct actions should be taken if it is found that an autoclave has been malfunctioning. The chance that this happens however is as large to happen in our project as it would be for other projects. Still it has to be checked as frequently as possible if the autoclave is functioning.

The usage of antibiotic resistance markers, to select for tetracycline resistance for example, increases the chance of spreading antibiotic resistance to pathogens. Conjugation and transduction is a way of DNA transfer between bacteria. There is a chance the antibiotic resistance genes end up in a pathogenic bacterium that isn’t intrinsically resistant to antibiotics. However, this hazard is present in most molecular microbiology research.

Some hazards have already been mentioned by giving the probabilities of them, but in the following paragraph a closer look to harmful effects will be taken.