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Team:Penn/Safety
From 2011.igem.org
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Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of:
Researcher safety: No. Researchers work in a biosafety level 2 lab under professional supervision at all times. We always wear protective gear such as lab coats, goggles, constantly-changed gloves, long pants, and closed-toed shoes.
Public safety: There are no issues of public safety because the lab is closed to the public and no lab materials leave the laboratory.
Environmental safety: While we do work with mammalian cells and ethidium bromide, there are strict disposal regulations that we follow. Our lab contains a sharps bin, biohazard bin, chemical waste, regular trash, and recycling bin.
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? No, we did not make any new BioBricks this year.
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? If no, which specific biosafety rules or guidelines do you have to consider in your country? A representative from a local biosafety committee has agreed to review the project in great detail (scheduled next week). We plan to show him our laboratory, the precautions we take, the materials we use in the project, and a detailed plan of our experiment.
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? In a paper we found by Dr. Philippe Marlière et al titled Chemical Evolution of a Bacterium’s Genome, directed evolution was applied to produce an E. coli strain which was unable to replicate without the addition of a synthetic nucleotide. They were unable to utilize thymine. This system is ideal in synthetic biology because various organisms can be produced without fear of integrating into the natural environment. They are strictly confined to the laboratory due to this essential need for a synthetic nucleotide.
