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Team:Berkeley/Safety
From 2012.igem.org
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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 various organisms including Discosoma sp. (blue mushroom corals) and have been expressed in the past. These proteins do not have biosafety issues when expressed in yeast or other organisms. If exposed or mishandled there would not be negative effects upon the researcher, the public or the environment.
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, 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
3. Is there a local bio-safety group, committee, or review board at your institution? If yes, what does your local bio-safety group think about your project? If no, which specific bio-safety rules or guidelines do you have to consider in your country?
UC Berkeley has bio-safety rules regulated by the Environmental & Health Safety (EH&S) office as well as the Committee on Laboratory and Environmental Bio-safety (CLEB). Their list of rules are outlined at the link right http://ehs.berkeley.edu/healthsafety/biosafety/researchguidelines.pdf.
Our project has been approved through EH&S after processing a 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.
Additionally: (from igem 2011)
Each member of our lab received biosafety training before the project began. This included general laboratory safety, radioactive material user training, biosafety, laser safety and hazardous and chemical spill training. These training sessions are put on by EH&S, and they offer them regularly in the form of a two hour lecture, as well as an online presentation and quiz. Furthermore, each member of the iGEM team was trained by our iGEM Graduate Student instructor on proper lab techniques and safety procedures.
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 bio-safety regulations into general design workflow would make the development of parts, devices and systems safer.
