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Team:Tokyo-NoKoGen
From 2011.igem.org
We are NOKOGEN
Welcome to our Wiki!
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11th of March 2011 – a date we will never forget – a devastating earthquake and tsunami hit the Tohoku area of Japan. This earthquake left a huge damage on us. Although it has been 4 months since the tragedy, people in Fukushima are still suffering today from the radioactive compound such as Cesium leaking from the corrupted nuclear power plant from the unforgettable earthquake.
What can we do to help? – was the question we asked ourselves to come up with a plan to make an E. coli radioactive cleaner. It is an E. coli that can take in radioactive Cesium contained inside water. By gathering and collecting the E. coli radioactive cleaner after the Cesium has been taken up, we will be left with clean water without radioactive compounds.
In Fukushima today, there is still tons of cesium contaminated water inside the nuclear power plant that has to be taken care of. Much of it has also leaked out into the city, the country, and into the ocean that has been detected in countries outside Japan. Many people fear that these Cesium might do us harm from its radioactivity. This is when our E. coli radioactive cleaner come into action. The E. coli radioactive cleaner that we made will decrease Cesium inside the contaminated water and so the water will become cleaner. The cleaned water can then be released into the ocean solving people’s worries to how to get rid of contaminated water.
We hope that people in Fukushima will be released from fear and stress and will be able to get back to their daily lives as soon as possible.
-Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of:
Our project will not raise any issues in researcher safety, public safety and environmental safety. Our project will be carried out with E. coli laboratory strains and we do not use any infectious organisms. Our laboratory work will be carried out in the laboratories of Prof. Sode (advisor), Assoc. Prof. Tsugawa (instructor) and Prof. Ikebukuro (instructor). Those laboratories have a proper facility of the biosafety level 2 to handle E. coli and perform genetic engineering experiments. In our project, we are trying to construct the E. coli that absorbs Cesium from radioactive-contaminated water. The ultimate aim of our project is to develop an E. coli machine that can be practically used to clean up radioactive-contaminated environment. However, genetically engineered organisms cannot be easily released to environment. All team members well understand this point. We are just aiming as biotechnologists at showing potential of synthetic biology for those applications that are harmful for humans and cannot be easily achieved by non-biological ways.
No,they don’t. Our BioBrick parts do not posess any safety risk for environment and researches. We will make a new BioBrick part that uptakes cesium from environment. This part is natively expressed in a non-harmful strain of E. coli and we will clone it from that strain. We are also trying to make new BioBrick parts to regulate gene expressing network. We will use those genes that already have analyzed in peer-reviewed papers. Thus that new BioBrick part will not raise any safety issues.
Yes, there is. There is the committee of Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, and we are following its safety and ethical guidelines. Heinrich's Law: for every 300 unsafe acts (no-injury accidents), there are 29 minor injuries and 1 major injury. So, minimizing the number of noinjury accidents will reduce the probability of more severe accidents. We suggest that all teams share any safety issues and solution timely on iGEM web site or wikis. That should prevent the occurrence of more serious hazards. |
