Team:DTU-Denmark/Safety Proposal

From 2011.igem.org

Modern biology uses variety of molecular techniques that allow making changes in living organisms. Some researchers aim at improving certain species to achieve better growth or a higher yield of a particular compound. Other use molecular biology to investigate and understand how organisms function at the molecular level. However, modifying living organisms raises an issue of biosafety as these can become dangerous to researchers, society or environment.

In order to assess potential perils of our project we answered following questions:

Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of research, public or environmental safety? No, our project doesn’t directly raise concern about biosafety in any of these categories. The regulatory system we are developing is designed to provide an extra level of control to any gene that someone might want to express. The tight regulation is released only if a certain external inducer becomes present. This requires a full control of the inducer and the medium that we are growing our cells in is devoid of it prior to induction. Setup like this can be easily achieved for laboratory research and industrial production when all parameters of the system are usually well controlled. This is not true however for natural environment as it might be difficult to foresee all probable sources of inducer.

Do any of the new BioBrick parts (or devices) that you made this year raise any safety issues? No, BioBricks which we created don’t raise any safety issues.

Is there a local biosafety group, committee, or review board at your institution? We presented our project idea to one of the biosafety inspectors that works at our university and discussed possible threats that might arise when using genetically modified organisms. We concluded that as long as we follow standard safety protocols according to which research at the Department of Systems Biology is done, our project poses no danger.

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 believe that future iGEM teams would be more challenged to look into biosafety issues if a new track award category was created, i.e. Best Safety project. Maybe some of the teams would consider creating BioBricks which trigger suicide once the organism escapes from the lab. Or designing an universal on/off device for controlling expression of any chosen gene.