Team:UTP-Panama/Safety

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Revision as of 07:07, 15 July 2011

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

• researcher safety,
• public safety, or
• environmental safety?

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?

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?
• If no, which specific biosafety rules or guidelines do you have to consider in your country?

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?

Safety Issues

1-For Researcher

Like our project is based in using the BioBricks to engineered devices, we do not have new safety issues in our project for researchers & students.

For Environment

The potencial risk of liberate a GMO into the environment should always be observed, due GMO ecological interactions have not been tested or studied for enough time.

2-About Devices

The devices that we are looking to improve are non-pathogenic.

3- About Biosafety Groups

Our University doesn't have a biosafety group, mainly because we don't have a biological & life sciences schools in our University. But with the emmergence of Synthetic Biology, the logic next step should be to develop it in order to fix limits in experimental projects and make aware students and professors. But we have the advise of The Institute for Scientific Research and High Technology Services, the Biosafety section of them collaborate with us for lab rules and projects safety observations. In Panama, Synthetic Biology doesn't have its own rules, but it should follow the rules of goverment to manage of GMO and bioethicas issues.

4- Ideas

• Our team is 100% compose of non-biological former students, in this sense we need more tutorial for lab techniques & safety requirements at the begin of the competition.
• We need a database of information (papers, books, etc) that explain the real implications and issues of use DNA recombinant technology to modify organism and understand the possible ways to analize their release on the environment. The question is: ¿How do we analize the interaction between new organisms and the environment?

Note: Actually we are consulting and working to establish some comite to debate about this and other issues that raises with the Synthetic Biology inside our University and the whole community.