Team:UC Davis/Safety

Safety Questionnaire

1.Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of:

• Researcher safety? No
• Public safety? No
• Environmental safety? No

2. Do any of the new BioBrick parts (or devices) that you made this year raise any safety issues? If yes, did you document these issues in the Registry? how did you manage to handle the safety issue? How could other teams learn from your experience?

• None of our parts raise any more safety concern than other parts in the registry. All BioBrick parts in backbones contain antibiotic resistance genes, which always confer some risk of environmental contamination if released into the local bacterial population. If we discover that any part used in our project is potentially dangerous, we will note it on the Registry page and take extra precaution when handling strains of bacteria containing constructs which include said part.

3. Is there a local biosafety group, committee, or review board at your institution? If yes, what does your local biosafety group think about your project?

• Our laboratory facility has a health and safety officer who performs regular inspections of all the labs in the building. The facility in which we work is a designated center for biomedical and genetic research. Because of this, the materials and techniques used by the iGEM team follow pre-existing health and safety standards covered by our parent lab, which are already approved by local safety personnel.

4. 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?

• We think that proper testing and characterization of each part is important to understanding the risk it might pose to researchers or the environment. A primary focus of our project is on the detailed characterization of parts: this will not only help us understand how the parts will work under various conditions, but should also reveal any potential safety concerns. Responsibility for providing details about the safety concerns for a given part should fall first on the team responsible for submitting it to the registry. A greater emphasis on teams submitting well-characterized parts would not only allow said parts to be used more efficiently, it would also reduce the risk of unsafe parts being widely distributed without the risks of their use being well-known.
  
  

Environmental Safety

All parts in the BioBrick system are placed into backbones containing antibiotic resistance genes which aid in the culture and selection of bacterial strains during the culturing process. These genes pose some risk to the environment in that there is a possibility that they could be transferred to local bacterial populations. For this to occur, strains containing antibiotic resistance genes would need to escape the controlled environment of our lab and to survive and grow.
We take protective measures to prevent this from happening. All plastic materials that come in contact with bacterial strains are autoclaved thoroughly prior to proper biomedical waste disposal. All liquids that might contain resistant cells are bleached before disposal. Lab workers do not wear gloves when outside the lab to avoid transmission of these bacteria to other parts of the facility.
If somehow our strains were introduced into the outside environment, it is unlikely that they would do serious damage. The antibiotic resistance genes offer very little selection advantage outside of a laboratory setting, and it is unlikely that strains would out-compete other bacterial strains. Our strains contain no islands of pathogenicity or other genes that would cause them to pose a threat to animal or plant populations outside of the lab.

Public Safety

Our project poses no more public safety concerns than any other iGEM project. The strains of E. coli we work with are non-pathogenic and considered safe, standard laboratory organisms. They do not possess any resistance to antibiotics not conferred by BioBrick backbones. Parts included in our constructs do not code for any toxins that would pose a threat to people. Our lab is not accessible to the public, and no materials are removed from lab without proper containment.

Researcher Safety

All personnel working in our lab are familiarized with our safety protocol regarding hazardous chemicals, biological waste, and mechanical hazards around the lab. They are required to sign safety forms to acknowledge their understanding of safety procedures and expectations. They are familiarized with lab safety equipment such as eyewash stations, emergency showers, spill cleanup kits, and first aid kits.
Our lab is kept clean, with minimal clutter on lab benches. This reduces the risk of chemical spillage and fire. When possible, we take effort to use chemicals that pose low risk to our researchers. For example, instead of using Ethidium Bromide to stain our gels, we use an alternative called SyberSAFE that poses much lower health risks. When dangerous chemicals must be used, we have several fume hoods available to researchers to minimize aerosol exposure, and designated containment areas for flammable, corrosive, and otherwise hazardous reagents. Researchers are required to wear face and eye protection, a labcoat to minimize skin exposure, and rubber gloves whenever working with ultraviolet light.