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Team:HUST-China/Safety
From 2012.igem.org
HUST CHINA
- 1. Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of: researcher safety, public safety, or environmental safety?
- All researchers have been trained with lab safety protocols and conducted the experiment strictly following the safety protocols. No one was injured or infected while working on our project. The microorganisms used in our project are E. coli strain DH5α and Pichia pastoris strains GS115 and X-33, which are not toxic or pathogenic. No lab waste was released to the environment before sterilization, minimizing the risk of biohazard.
- 2. Do any of the new BioBrick parts (or devices) that you made this year raise any safety issues?
-No. None of the BioBrick parts we made pose any safety problems we can foresee. None of the parts we made produce toxic or pathogenic protein, and all parts are found in common bacterial species.
- 3. Is there a local biosafety group, committee, or review board at your institution?
- The Department of Life Science and Technology of Huazhong University of Science and Technology makes sure that every project is evaluated of its biosafety issues before initiation. The head of department and our advisors approved of our project with knowledge that our project would not raise safety problems. One of our advisors emphasized to us the specific rules of his lab where we conducted our experiments, such as not mixing contaminated apparatus with uncontaminated ones, always clean up after use, etc.
- 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?
- iGEM could make every team sign a safety form when applying, in order for all teams to follow a same set of safety rules.
- A suicide mechanism can be included in all BioBrick plasmids. This suicide mechanism may sense the density of the bacteria or the product and eliminating themselves when density is too high. This mechanism makes sure that harmful BioBricks do not reach the amount to affect the environment and ecosystems.
