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From 2011.igem.org

Safety

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

No issue of researcher safety, public safety or environmental safety were raised during Debrecen's iGEM 2011 project. We only worked with non-hazardous, non-infectious, commonly used and accepted bacteria strain (DH5α) and mammalian cancer cell lines (COS-1). When working with toxic chemicals (e.g. ethidiumbromide or estrogen), nitrile gloves, and white coats were worn. All of the work was conducted in a biosafety level S1 laboratory. Rules of the best microbiological practices were applied.

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

All material handled or distributed are non-hazardous and non-infectious. It agrees with all safety standards requested biosafety level 1, therfore the project get a full supports for the work done by the iGEM team. We developed synthetic LBD's for use in mammalian cells in fusion parts. These parts are completely harmless, no matter what organism they are transformed / transfected into.

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

All of our work complies with the University of Debrecen's local biosafety and bioethics regulations. Our project leader and team instructors oversaw the biological safety issue throughout the whole working time this year. There is also a biosafety supervisor who supervises the overall laboratory work biosecurity-wise. All team members who worked at the bench this summer have had proper safety training. We received approval from all overseeing groups.

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?

An important tool to raise interest and knowledge in safety issues is education. Open source webpages containing regulations, new ideas, video tutorials etc. can be designed. Online forums, trainings, courses should be organized in order to share new issues between groups and experts.

Arsenic

Team Debrecen-Hungary has decided to give a hand with testing the BBa_J33203 part. As the South-East of Hungary is highly affected by the arsenic problem (there are wells in which the level of arsenic exceeds the allowed limit), we had the possibility to use real-world samples for testing.

We collected samples from two wells which were known to contain elevated arsenic concentration (Szegfű and Madách street, Békéscsaba, Hungary). We used DH5 alpha E. coli cell line with lacZDM15 mutation as host cells, than we prepared a medium consisting of peptone, yeast extract, NaCl, K2HPO4, NaHCO3, bromthymol blue, and autoclaved water samples of different dilutions. We spiked these media with the transformed cells, and after 24 hours of incubation at 37°C we received that the part works also on real world samples, not only on samples made of water and sodium-arsenate. The colour change of Bromothymol Blue seemed to be directly proportional to the concentration of arsenic. The reference dilutions made from Na-arsenate and MilliQ water shows that the concentration of arsenic in our collected samples is at least 15x higher than the WHO recommended limit.

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