Team:UANL Mty-Mexico/Safety/biobricks

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

The project of this year as well as the past, are based mainly on the use nontoxic/nonpathogenic parts. Although working with rare BioBrick parts such as Mocr derivated from Ocr (potent inhibitor of DNA restriction and modification enzymes type I of bacteriophage T7; (DelProposto, 2009), which no longer presents these effects because it have been modified in two amino acids. Also many parts used from bacteriophages are mostly regulatory used and show no damage to team members, general public or the environment.  We worked with E. coli organism risk 1, which is well-characterized and present minimal hazard to laboratory personnel or environment.

As mentioned above, it is not intended to release the microorganism to the environment (biosensor, chelator and arsenic remover). Although it is planned that in a future after having spent enough money and evidence to prove lack of pathogenicity or horizontal transfer of genes and biological locks functioning properly, there is the possibility of using bioremediation in water contaminated with arsenic in major cities, industrial and mining fields in Mexico.

We commit to document and record all parts of this project with all necessary information and clearly specify the parts that may have a conflict with biosafety issues.