Team:UTP-Panama/Safety

From 2011.igem.org

Revision as of 18:24, 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

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

For Environment

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

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 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 students and professors aware of this. But we have the advise of The Institute for Scientific Research and High Technology Services; their Biosafety section will collaborate with us for lab rules and project's 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 compose of students of engineering degrees, but no member of our team has studied or is studying biology as a career in college, for this reason we need more tutorial for lab techniques & safety requirements at the beginning of the competition.
• We need a database of information (papers, books, etc) that explains the real implications and issues of using DNA recombinant technology to modify organisms 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: At present we are consulting and working to establish some comite to debate about this and other issues that raise from Synthetic Biology inside our University and the whole community.