Our Approach to Biological Safety Concerns Regarding Our CRISPR Project

Identifying Safety Issues in Our CRISPR Project

Working in a lab can be fun but also dangerous if safety for the student, society, and environment are not addressed. Therefore, the safety issues of these three important entities will be examined under the scope of risk assessment. To assess risk for a biological material many factors have to be considered, which include but are limited to: pathogenicity, ability to survive outside of the lab, public awareness of the biological agent, availability of a prophylaxis, environmental impact, and ability to monitor biological material that are potentially dangerous.

We assess risk for the biological material involved in our project and its potential impact to the researchers, public society, and environment by taking into account two components of risk: probability and hazard. With probability, we ask ourselves:

• What are the likely and unlikely (including worst-case) scenarios of conducting research in our project?
• Is there a potential risk that may compromise in any way researchers, society, or the environment? How likely that risk comes to fruition?

Questions to consider about hazards associated with biological material risk are:

• If the project works, what may be the potentials hazards to researchers, society, and the environment?
• By what mechanism may the engineered organism of the project affect researchers, society, and the environment?
• If the engineered organism is used outside the lab, how may natural mutations to the organism's DNA affect and alter the functionality and concomitant risks to researchers, society, and the environment?

We assess biological safety risks with these questions in mind in an effort to make our project acceptably safe according to the standards set by organizations, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), the Convention on Biological Diversity, the National Institute of Health (NIH), American Biological Safety Association, Center for Disease Control, among other risk management groups, and conferences with an emphasis in synthetic biology and safety such as the SB5.0 conference. In addition, complying with these safety standards will make the project and its future directions more approachable for acceptance by the public society.

Researcher Safety

Public Safety

Any concern for public safety is currently not anticipated. The strain of E. coli that we are experimenting with are non-pathogenic and not viable outside the lab. Materials with bacterial exposure are disinfected with bleach before they are washed. All team members wash their hands upon leaving the lab.

Environmental safety

The safety of the surrounding environment should not be compromised. The E. coli strain is non-pathogenic and are disinfected with the proper chemicals when cleaning materials.

BioBrick Safety Issues

No, our BioBrick parts and novel ones do not pose any issues in safety. All parts are being transformed in non-pathogenic E. coli and being expressed in vivo.

Biological Safety Provisions

Yes, the safety aspect of our project is being supervised by the Institutional Biosafety Committee at USC. All of the protocols are approved by the IBC at USC.

Thoughts on How to Improve Safety in iGEM

Sometimes, there seems to be a disconnection between the scientific community and the general public when discussing safety issues that stem from scientific research. With a new and rapidly evolving field that is synthetic biology entering the frame, we encourage our fellow colleagues and teams to be open-minded and communicative to the public regarding not only the benefits of the projects and synthetic biology as a whole, but also the potential harms, both physical and non-physical (e.g. morality) so that the public can be well-informed and hopefully accepting of this new science.