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From 2012.igem.org

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Contents 1 1. Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of researcher, public or environmental safety? 2 Biosafety Level 2.1 2. Do any of the new BioBrick parts that you made this year raise any safety issues? 2.2 3. Is there a local biosafety group, committee or review board at your institution? If yes, what do they think of your project? 2.3 Do you have any other ideas how to deal with safety issues that could be useful for future iGEM competitions?

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

Biosafety Level

We are only working with E. Coli (NEB DH10B), which is classified as a biosafety level 1 organism. We are not using any toxin-producing plasmids. We are developing pseudorandom novel sequence, but the sequence is checked to ensure it does not code for any protein (translation start codons are removed).

All of our wetlab team members have received lab safety training. This was a two-hour training session covering safe handling and disposal of lab equipment and reagents. All of our bacteria are non-pathogenic and we are not using any highly toxic or carcinogenic substances, so even if something does go wrong, there is little risk to team members.

In terms of public and environmental hazard, risk is minimal. Our cells are lab strains, unlikely to survive in the wild. We do use antibiotic resistance for selection, so there is always a risk of transfer, but such risk is empirically quite small, since such selection has been performed for years without significant problems. Our project focuses on computational parts, so there is little risk of abuse. Even if everything goes wrong and the bacteria escape the lab, they will quickly die off and are unlikely to cause any disease or environmental imbalance.

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

None of the parts we are working on raise safety issues. They are only promoters and RNA-based repressors; we are not submitting any protein-coding sequence. None of our constructs significantly affect pathogenicity or evolutionary advantage of the bacteria.

3. Is there a local biosafety group, committee or review board at your institution? If yes, what do they think of your project?

Our school biosafety committee says that our project "falls under the general biosafety umbrella of work already going on in those lab spaces". In other words, our methods, protocols, and safety procedures are all in use in these labs already, and have been previously confirmed as safe.

Do you have any other ideas how to deal with safety issues that could be useful for future iGEM competitions?

The best way to guarantee safety is to stick with standard procedures. The more people who have used a protocol, the less chance that there is an unknown risk. Since our innovation is in computational parts, we stuck with time-tested protocols for all of our wetlab work. We depart from standards only in designing our new promoter/repressor pairs, and we are then careful to make sure the new sequence does not code for protein.