Team:Toronto/Safety

Tell us more about your project. Give us background. Use this is the abstract of your project. Be descriptive but concise (1-2 paragraphs)

Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues?

Safety was a large concern when vetting possible ideas for the iGEM 2011 at the University of Toronto. Due to the lack of accessible facilities for higher bio-safety level work. All our experiments are confined to Bio-safety level 1 labs.

Our project is to engineer an E.coli bacterium to express proteins which can help it form magnetic particles known as magnetite from Ferrous ions in solution. The proteins of interest are derived from the bacterium Magnetosprillium magneticum which is non-pathogenic and found in all bodies of water. Due to difficulties in culturing Magnetosprillium magneticum in the lab we have only worked with genomic DNA from ATCC.

In the worst case scenario if our engineered bacterium were to escape the confines of the laboratory the environmental effects would be minimal. We are using non-pathogenic strains of E.coli, therefore the public would not become infected if our bacterium were to escape. Also if we were successful in producing magnetite the bacterium could the possibly remove potentially hazardous Ferrous ions and create stable inert magnetite crystals.

Do the new BioBrick parts that you made this year raise safety issues?

Our planned bio-bricks consists of a Vector to enable the His-Tagging of standard biobrick parts, a magnetite binding fusion protein and a number of protein coding genes found in Magnetosprillium magneticum which is an ubiquitous organism found in all bodies of water. These proteins and genes should not confer any added fitness or antibiotic resistance to bacterium found in the environment.