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

As in any form of biological engineering, there is a risk that our new strains could be introduced into the environment. Even in the unlikely event that this happens, our strains of E. coli would do no harm to the surrounding ecosystem. First, our strain is non-pathogenic which means all persons in the surrounding area are completely safe from disease. Next, it is highly improbable that our strains would grow at all in the soil or local vegetation given that growing them in the lab with the ideal conditions of temperature and abundant nutrients is not always trivial! If somehow our strains got into the environment, found ideal conditions and grew, the engineered plasmids would not offer any selective advantage to the cells and would most likely be kicked out by the cells. The only possible advantage would be a resistance to carbenicillin since it is used as a selective marker in lab, but this resistance would offer no significant selective advantage in the wild. Additionally, we autoclave and often bleach any lab materials that were used with cells before disposing of them. This also helps to ensure that our strains are not introduced into the environment.

Public Safety

Our project poses no public safety concerns. The strains of E. coli we work with are non-pathogenic and well characterized. We are at no risk of releasing any toxins, dangerous chemicals or starting an epidemic. We work in a closed lab which is not accessible to the public and nothing from lab is taken outside without proper containment.

Researcher Safety

We take personal safety very seriously. Every member must sign safety forms after being familiarized with general lab safety equipment such as eyewash stations, showers, spill cleanup kits, and chemical safety. We work in a clean lab where all hazardous materials are clearly marked and contained and we always wear gloves and closed toed shoes when working at the bench. We

Yes, there is a biosafety group here at UC Davis. Our lab is inspected regularly and has passed the safety tests each time.


We think that accountability and responsible engineering are key when designing a safe and effective system. Thorough testing is helpful in producing safe products, and our project involves a great amount of characterization of our constructs. Adding barcodes or other identifying features to DNA parts submitted from our lab to the registry could promote responsibility for parts and accountability for any future safety concerns, but great care should be taken to ensure that any DNA-based tags on parts do not affect their function.