Safety

iGEM UT-Tokyo

Safety

Our answers to the questions posed at https://2011.igem.org/Safety are as follows:

1. Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of researcher safety, public safety, or environmental safety?

As long as we conduct experiments following the safety manual mentioned below (and of course we do follow) and obey the laws on biotechnology when conducting our experiments, we think our ideas raise no safety problems.

2. Do any of the new BioBrick parts (or devices) that you made this year raise any safety issues?

No. The genes we use this year are cloned from the E. coli JM109 strain and we think our bacteria are no more environmentally harmful nor evolutionarily advantageous than wild type E. coli.

3. Is there a local biosafety group, committee, or review board at your institution?

Yes. The Nureki laboratory at which we work follows the safety manual[http://www.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/offices/esmo/manual.html] of the School of Science, University of Tokyo. Our instructors from this lab think our project does not raise any safety problems.

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?

If there are more strictly defined rules and evaluations for safety, we believe they will raise the safety level of this competition and be useful in an educational and academic sense.