Researcher Safety

We attended a general health & safety induction and were given a safety tour of our lab involving guidance in waste disposal of sharps, trace chemicals, and biohazardous material. As a risk reduction measure we opted to use Qiagen kits rather than phenol based protocols. Ethidium bromide is an intercalating agent (inserts into the DNA helix) in common use in laboratories as a means of detecting nucleic acids through agarose gel electrophoresis. As ethidium bromide distorts the structure of the DNA helix, it is a mutagen and carcinogen.To avoid the risk of exposure to ethidium bromide, we decided instead to use GelRed stain in our agarose. E.coli MG1655 is a disabled K12 strain which is non-pathogenic and is used for research purposes only. Salmonella is an LT2a strain which is attenuated making it non-pathogenic. This strain is allowed to be handled as a class 1 pathogen rather than class 2 so is not categorized as a biohazard.

While working in the lab, we are supervised by our instructors, advisors or lab technicians from the University’s School of Life Sciences Learning & Teaching staff.

Public Safety

Lab safety protocols were followed to prevent contamination and potential spread out with the lab. We aim to raise public awareness of synthetic biology and research involving genetic modification of bacteria, so the local community can gain an understanding of our work and the ethics surrounding it.

Environmental Safety

All of our work with bacteria is contained within the lab and careful adherence to safety procedures will help to ensure that contamination does not occur. Our E.coli K12 strain has been shown to survive poorly in the environment, has a history of safe use, and is not known to have adverse effects on microorganisms or plants. Genes encoding BMCs are frequently laterally transferred and already widespread among the bacterial phyla.

We are using ampicillin resistant genes within our plasmid as a selectable marker for bacterial transformations. As we are aware of the issues surrounding horizontal gene transfer and multi-drug resistant bacteria, we are following University protocols regarding GMO waste disposal. The ultimate goal of our project, as with any iGEM project, is for our modified bacteria to be used practically. Our final step would be to remove antibiotic resistance from our plasmid prior to release of our bacteria into the environment.

BioBrick Parts

We do not foresee any safety concerns with any of the biobricks we plan to produce. The Pdu proteins are structural proteins that form the Salmonella propanediol-utilising (Pdu) micro compartment. 1,2-propanediolde gradation is implicated in pathogenesis [9] but the individual structural proteins or assembled micro compartment itself are not known to have any harmful properties.

We discussed the details of our project with both the Health & Safety Coordinator andInformation Officer for our College of Life Sciences. They helped us to produce a general lab risk assessment and a risk assessment specific to our project.

We have approval from our College of Life Sciences Biological Safety Committee and have provided them with a GMO form.

Bio Safety Engineering

We are hoping to create a Safety Database. Based on a system in use at our university which has proved successful, we have created a database to store records of accidents that members of iGEM teams have experienced. Teams can then learn from the experiences of others and potentially avoid having similar accidents