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Team:VIT Vellore/Safety
From 2011.igem.org
Do any of the new BioBrick parts (or devices) that you made this year raise any safety issues?
As you would have gathered from out project description, our organism’s presence and role is in the human alimentary canal, particularly the small intestine. There is a particular toxin called enterotoxin which has a particularly marked effect upon the gastrointestinal tract, causing vomiting, diarrhoea, and abdominal pain. So, we have compared all the sequences of our various biobricks to the sequence of enterotoxin (using NCBI-BLAST) to check for similarity on any level. The results are as shown:-
BLAST Results for Existing Parts
As you can see, certain parts showed one or more hits. To nullify this effect we have introduced a kill switch :-
a toxin which is induced by an external molecule – in case of any emergency, the external molecule can be ingested which activates the toxin and thereby kills the e.coli containing the plasmid
(OR)
use of antibiotics to kill the e.coli cells. Taking into account the damage caused to the native e.coli population in the gut, the use of antibiotics must be followed by an appropriate dose of a suitable probiotic.
Is there a local biosafety group, committee, or review board at your institution?
Unfortunately there is no such biosafety group. So we’ve decided , after due consultation with our faculty advisors, to follow the following biosafety guidelines. Laboratory Biosafety Manual
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?
Based on the work we have done so far with BioBricks we are confident that the BioBricks are safe to use and no additional safety precautions are necessary, however if we encounter any issues in the future and find soluti0ons to the same we will update this page.
