Safety Q&A

Our answers to the questions posed at https://2012.igem.org/Safety are as follows:

1. Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of researcher safety, public safety, or environmental safety?

As long as we conduct experiments following the safety manual of mentioned below (and of course we do follow) and obey the laws on biotechnology when conducting our experiments, we think our ideas raise no safety problems.
Our safety manual is the the safety manual of the School of Engineering [http://safetymanual.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/]. This is internal access only. So, if needed, please see the safety manual of the School of Science [http://www.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/offices/esmo/manual.html], which is similar to that of the School of Engineering.

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

No. The genes we use this year are cloned from the E. coli JM109 strain and we think our bacteria are no more environmentally harmful nor evolutionarily advantageous than wild type E. coli.

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

Yes. We work at Noji laboratory, School of Engineering, the University of Tokyo.
There are

• Health and Safety Office
  • Committee on Genetically Modified Organisms and Microbes for Research
  • Research Ethics Committee

in the School of Engineering, and there is

• Office for Life Science Research Ethics and Safety [http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ja/administration/lifescience/]

in the University of Tokyo.

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?

If there are more strictly defined rules and evaluations for safety, we believe they will raise the safety level of this competition and be useful in an educational and academic sense.