Team:Michigan/Safety

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Safety

1. Would the materials used in your project and/or your final product pose:

• a. Risks to the safety and health of team members or others in the lab?
• b. Risks to the safety and health of the general public if released by design or accident?
• c. Risks to environmental quality if released by design or accident?
• d. Risks to security through malicious misuse by individuals, groups or states?

a. We do use materials in the lab that are potentially dangerous to us as team members handling them. One such example is ethidium bromide. Ethidium bromide is a potential mutagen because it works by inserting itself between the two strands of double-stranded DNA. While the amount of ethidium bromide kept in our lab is relatively small, it may still disrupt the replication of mitochondrial DNA.

Concentrated hydrochloric acid (HCl) is another reagent we use in the lab that could be dangerous. HCl is an extremely strong acid that is dangerous either in mist or solution form. HCl is corrosive to human tissues and as such we handle is extremely carefully and as little as possible, diluting it before use if we can.

NaOCl, sodium hypochlorite, is another reagent we use that is potential dangerous. We use it in the form of household bleach to disinfect and clean our glassware, including glassware that had contained bacteria. Because we use a highly diluted form of bleach, it is no more dangerous than using it to clean in a household. We just take care to use gloves while washing glassware with the bleach and to not inhale heavily.

b. While the materials listed in part a. could potentially be dangerous to the general public, we do not use any of them in high enough concentration to where accidentally releasing them could be dangerous to our surroundings. For example, ethidium bromide can be a mutagen for human DNA. However, ethidium bromide is sold in extremely small amounts and as such would not harm our surrounding community if released. The same is true for our hydrochloric acid and the sodium hypochlorite we use is the Chlorox brand that can be bought in stores for household consumption. If the two, hydrochloric acid and sodium hypochlorite, were combined, they could potentially create toxic chlorine gas. However, if this gas was released to the surrounding air outside our laboratory, the dangerous gas could diffuse throughout the air, reducing toxicity in one concentrated place.

c. There are some materials that we use that could potentially harm the environment if released. As stated in part c., chlorine gas could form if we allow our bleach and concentrated hydrochloric acid to mix. We keep these reagents separated to keep this from happening.

d. Chlorine gas is dangerous and has been used as a weapon within the past 100 years. For example, it was used as a poison gas in World War I as well as by insurgent groups in Iraq in 2007. These events have occurred before our use of the two ingredients used to make chlorine gas, so it is clear that our use of them are not a cause of any new weapon.

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

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

Overall, our project is very safe. If we wanted to allow the public to look at our cell patterns, we would have to take precautions to ensure that any viewers would be safe. We have discussed this with the company we get our microarrays from, and we are sure that the microarray slides themselves are safe to work with.

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?

There are no major safety issues involved with our part. Even though the zinc finger binding domain binds to double-stranded DNA, it will not mutate the DNA in any shape or form (unlike ethidium bromide that goes between the bases of DNA). Additionally our protein that contains the zinc finger is inert, no nuclease activity.

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?

We take safety seriously on our team. All of our members are required to attend training sessions provided by the Occupational Safety and Environmental Health administration. These sessions deal with General Lab Safety and Autoclave Training. Our team has had meetings in past years with medical faculty to discuss biosafety, and we will plan another meeting this year.

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?

All iGEM teams should go through mandatory lab safety training at a minimum. In order to make parts safer, we could require that each part pass the approval of a “safety committee.” This is not ideal however, because it would slow down the cloning process and would be expensive in terms of time and cost to implement. We could also prepare tests that each part could go through to ensure that they meet safety standards.