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Team:UC Davis/Safety
From 2011.igem.org
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Safety Questionnaire
1.Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of:
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?
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?
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?
1.Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of:
- researcher safety? No
- public safety? No
- environmental safety? No
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?
- None of our parts raise any safety issues. If we discover that any part of our project is potentially dangerous, we will note it on the Registry page and take extra precaution when working with it.
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?
- They approve of it and are fully supportive.
- N/a
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?
- We think that proper testing and characterization of each part is necessary in order to fully understand how it will work in every situation. In addition, we think that the Registry could have a stricter distribution policy.
Environmental Safety
As in any form of biological engineering, there is a risk that our new strains could be introduced into the environment. Even in the unlikely event that this happens, our strains of E. coli would do no harm to the surrounding ecosystem. First, our strain is non-pathogenic which means all persons in the surrounding area are completely safe from disease. Next, it is highly improbable that our strains would grow at all in the soil or local vegetation given that growing them in the lab with the ideal conditions of temperature and abundant nutrients is not always trivial! If somehow our strains got into the environment, found ideal conditions and grew, the engineered plasmids would not offer any selective advantage to the cells and would most likely be kicked out by the cells. The only possible advantage would be a resistance to carbenicillin since it is used as a selective marker in lab, but this resistance would offer no significant selective advantage in the wild.
As in any form of biological engineering, there is a risk that our new strains could be introduced into the environment. Even in the unlikely event that this happens, our strains of E. coli would do no harm to the surrounding ecosystem. First, our strain is non-pathogenic which means all persons in the surrounding area are completely safe from disease. Next, it is highly improbable that our strains would grow at all in the soil or local vegetation given that growing them in the lab with the ideal conditions of temperature and abundant nutrients is not always trivial! If somehow our strains got into the environment, found ideal conditions and grew, the engineered plasmids would not offer any selective advantage to the cells and would most likely be kicked out by the cells. The only possible advantage would be a resistance to carbenicillin since it is used as a selective marker in lab, but this resistance would offer no significant selective advantage in the wild.
Our BioBrick parts pose little safety risk. As always, the use of antibiotic resistance in bacterial selection does introduce the possibility of spreading this resistance to bacterial populations outside of our lab. Because of this, we take care to ensure that there is as little transmittance as possible between our antibiotic resistant strains in the lab and bacteria populations in the local environment.
Yes, there is a biosafety group here at UC Davis. Our lab is inspected regularly and has passed the safety tests each time.
We think that accountability and responsible engineering are key when designing a safe and effective system. Thorough testing is helpful in producing safe products, and our project involves a great amount of characterization of our constructs. Adding barcodes or other identifying features to DNA parts submitted from our lab to the registry could promote responsibility for parts and accountability for any future safety concerns, but great care should be taken to ensure that any DNA-based tags on parts do not affect their function.
