Team:Berkeley/Safety

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Home Team Project Results Notebook Safety


1. Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of:

   researcher safety,
   public safety, or
   environmental safety?

○ No, we used Saccharomyces cerevisiae throughout our experiments, a non pathogenic organism. The fluorescent proteins used for tagging can be found naturally in Discosoma sp., blue mushroom corals, and have no biosafety issues when expressed in yeast or other organisms, and have been expressed in the past

The E. coli used for part production are also non pathogenic strains

2. Do any of the new BioBrick parts (or devices) that you made this year raise any safety issues? If yes, ○ No

3. 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?

From 2011 igem berkeley:

UC Berkeley has its own biosafety rules that are regulated by the Environmental & Health Safety (EH&S) office as well as the Committee on Laboratory and Environmental Biosafety (CLEB). Their list of rules are outlined at the link right here.

We have also discussed our project with the Committee on Laboratory and Environmental Biosafety, which presides over biosafety in our laboratory.

Does our project require? We ha ve filled out their required safety document called the Biological Use Authorization (BUA), which asked us to outline our project and discuss any possible safety concerns our project may present. The document’s questions can be read right here.


In the US, the CDC works with the National Institutes of Health to publish national biosafety guidelines.


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?

We believe that integrating the safety concerns into new software tools as well as integrating biosafety regulations into general design workflow would improve adherence to biosafety regulations.


Teams, please document any answers to these safety questions on your wiki safety page. Judges will be asked to evaluate your project, in part, on the basis of if and how you considered and addressed issues of biological safety. If any questions arise regarding iGEM and biological safety please send an email to safety AT igem.org.



Use this page to answer the questions on the safety page.