Team:Fudan D/Safety

From 2012.igem.org

Safety

The FUDAN_D 2012 iGEM team considered the biosafety issues priority to our project. We take the safety issues seriously to ensure the safety of team members as well as evaluate the potential risk to the public and environment. We consider the safety issues in these several aspects:

1. Researcher safety, public safety and environmental safety a. Researchers safety We take several measures to ensure the researchers safety. All the members have to be well trained with the experimental skills and self-protection measurement before they could join any lab work. Gloves, masks and laboratory coats have to be worn to protect the researchers from contacting any harmful or toxic reagents. Our laboratory work doesn’t involve any pathogen. b. Public and environmental safety We use E.coli and yeast as the model organisms. The strains involved in our project are non-virulent and most common used in microbiology laboratories for basic biological studies: the E.coli strain DH5α for amplifying BioBricks and the yeast strain W303-1B to test the characteristics of the artificial telomeres. We disinfect all the cultures by autoclaving to avoid leakage of any genetically engineered bacteria. Bacterial and gene construction will be restrained in the laboratory and not be distributed or released to the environment. So our project does not post risk to the public and environment.

2. BioBricks The biological parts we design are genes commonly studied and well characterized, with known function only in yeast and should not produce toxins or harmful chemicals to other organisms. The artificial telomere part won’t produce harmful effect its own. We also design Cre recombinase system as a switch so that the system can be induced and under control. Both the functional gene system and the nuclease system have the effect to make the host organism experience a suicide-like procedure, so the host yeast won’t survival in nature with the system functions. The bacterial transfection selection strategy is the commonly used antibiotic resistance. The plasmid we use plasmid containing Amp resistance only so that the bacteria can be killed by other types of antibiotics to minimum the potential possibility to produce drug-resistance bacteria. We use auxotroph strategy to select the transfection of yeast and won’t lead to drug resistance problem.

3. Local biosafety group We strictly follow the guidelines and policies established by both the state government and our university. All the biosafety related aspects, both the proper design and the regulated lab work, are supervised by the Biosafety Committee of Fudan University. Also, we thank Pro. Baorong Lu(President Elect, the International Association for Biosafety Research (ISBR) in 2008, Member of the Chinese National Biosafety Committee) for discussing the potential impact about safety of our project and giving us lectures about general biosafety issues.

4. Suggestion to future iGEM team Unlike higher life form, the life of bacteria is not restricted by the limitation of “age”. So there is always concern over the unlimited growth of bacterial that are out of control. The original design of our project is to set an “age” to the model organisms imitating the telomeres mechanism, so that the organism will die automatically after several generations without manual control. But the complication of living system always raises problems. The gene transfer and mutation reality can cause the synthetic organisms evolve and adapt quickly to the environment so it’s impossible to assess the potential risk in the reality usage of the engineered organism. We think this is the most important direction in future synthetic biology research.