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From 2012.igem.org

Welcome to our Safety Page. We will first answer the safety questions asked by iGEM headquarters briefly, and then discuss safety issues associated with our project in detail. As well, we will report our ideas and practice on guaranteeing and developing biosafety.

Brief Answers to the Questions

Q1. Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of: Researcher safety, public safety, or environmental safety?
Our design is based on the commonly used E.coli K12 strain and genes we manipulate are original genes contained in E. coli and the protein products, at least from current understanding, will cause no harm to researchers, the public and environment. In addition, strict lab practice is executed to further ensure the safety.

Q2. 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?
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?
Yes, we will discuss this question in latter part of this page ([[Safety Considerations of Our Biobrick parts and Our Project]]).

Q3. 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?
Yes. All materials obtained have received the approvals from the department's laboratory management committees. We are also obliged to observe the regulations of Scientific Training Room and apply for approval for materials before we start our project.

Q4. 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?
Some classified measures should be taken according to the safety of the material. For example, plasmids that may harm the safety, when submitted, should receive more attention and have a stricter package. Some harmful byproducts of researches should be eliminated after the competition if without further value for researches.
We have done our human practice aiming at publicizing biosafety ideas to the public, which is what we are really inclined to popularize to other teams for future iGEM competitions.

General Safety Issues

In this part, we will illustrate organisms, reagents and equipments we use that may cause safety problems, and introduce our operation standard, management and trains protecting the team members, public and environment.

Organism Used

As above, all the organisms and DNA hosts are not high individual or community risk. Until now, the only used organism is E. coli K.12 (and some of its varieties, for example, DH5α mutational strain weaker than wild type). Our current lab of basic-biosafety level 1 is safe enough to manipulate this strain. Only the genome (a generous present from University of Dundee iGEM team), but not the living Salmonella enterica was manipulated in the lab, and the genes from it are homogeneous of E. coli K.12, not associated with pathogenesis. We will not implement our future experimental plan with microorganisms of risk group 2 or vertebrates in our current lab, for too low is the biosafety level and no animal facilities.

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