Team:UANL Mty-Mexico/Safety

From 2011.igem.org

Revision as of 00:34, 14 July 2011

Safety

Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of researcher safety, public safety, or environmental safety?

Our project does not raise any safety issues, we are working with E. coli strains that are specifically weakened for laboratory use.

In this project we mostly work with BioBricks, and we are following iGEM-HQ recommendations in order to prevent any risk.

Nevertheless, we take some safety precautions while working with especial situations:

• While using ethidium bromide to stain DNA, we have a reserved area to do this, it is well indicated and we use the proper protection to handle this material.
• While observing a stained gel of DNA with UV-light, we use especial protection for the eyes.
• While managing electric circuits, we always use the appropriate tool and take especial cares to prevent any accident.

We do not consider our project represents any safety risk for the public. As we mentioned above, we are working with weakened E. coli strains and what we are constructing with BioBricks is not a dangerous application of them. And, to mention, these constructions we are doing do not represent risk for healthy on any human.

In addition, we would like to say our project aims to finally produce non-harmful proteins that does not represent any risk not even in cases of horizontal transfer, therefore it doesn't compromise at environmental safety level.

Do any of the new BioBrick parts (or devices) that you made this year raise any safety issues?

Our project is mostly based in the use of BioBricks already listed in the Registry of Standard Biological Parts. Nevertheless, the BioBricks we are constructing do not represent any safety issues for public nor environment.

Do you have any other ideas how to deal with safety issues that could be useful for future iGEM competitions? How could parts, devices and systems be made even safer through biosafety engineering?