Team:Wageningen UR/Safety/Five

Risks and benefits

For both parts of the project, the risk to the practitioners is rather small. The risk on a negative effect to the environment due to the practice is considered to be intermediate. That is because the effects can’t have been studied yet – unforeseen hazards might turn up.

A robust biological oscillator that could be integrated into more complex genetic circuits would be of great utility for more advanced synthetic biology applications, especially related to quorum sensing. One can also envision the oscillator as a core component of a system sequentially performing specific enzymatic reactions.

The Track ‘n Trace project seeks mainly fundamental knowledge, and is an attempt to introduce a new, biotechnologically useful eukaryotic model to iGEM. A better understanding of, and control of intercellular mass transfer in hyphal fungi could also prove beneficial for engineering solid state fermentation cultures.

Based on these considerations, we have concluded that the potential benefits in successfully executing our projects outweighs the risk of serious hazards occurring.