Team:Marburg SYNMIKRO/Safety

Safety questions

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

- researcher safety,

- public safety,

- or environmental safety?

No, we are only working with bacterial strains of the safety level 1, these are the Escherichia coli K12 derivatives: TOP10, DH5alpha. Our lab is registered as gene technology lab. Our instructor Michael Bölker serves as Biosafety Officer at the Department of biology in is therefore very familiar with safety regulations and precautions. All members of the team were instructed on the general rules concerning good laboratory practice and working with genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Our lab is fully equipped with facilities to inactivate microbiological waste by autoclaving.

2. Do any of the new BioBrick parts (or devices) that you made this year raise any safety issues?

No, none of our biobricks (or devices) in their present design raise any safety issues. As proof of principle of our recombination system we have chosen well-known fluorescent proteins and bacterial localization domains that are not harmful. However, future developments of our genetic recombination system may be potentially hazardous, since novel combinations of protein domains are generated. Although extremely unlikely, some of these combinations may result in proteins with unwanted properties, e.g. toxic or tumorigenic activity. Therefore, we recommend to perform future experiments with large number of modules and domains under higher safety precaution levels.

3. Is there a local biosafety group, committee, or review board at your institution?

Yes, all working groups (including the iGEM team) of the university and the center for synthetic microbiology are regularly visited by local biosafety officers and those from the regional government. We have to assess the safety level of our experiments every year.

If yes, what does your local biosafety group think about your project?

Since the local biosafety officer is one of our instructors, we have discussed all safety issues extensively. We learned a lot about the legal regulation of experiments concerning genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

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 propose that all parts (biobricks), devices or strains that are listed in the registry are marked if there has been raised any concern on biosafety issues concerning this part, device or strain.