Team:Fudan Lux/Safety

1.Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues ？

Every member of our team has at least one year experience or training at regular laboratories in Fudan University before they are recruited into our iGEM team. In the lab training, there are routine biosafety lectures every month which ensures everyone in lab to have enough knowledge about lab-safety and common satety issues. Therefore, our members are all aware of basic safety rules.

Moreover, our projects are well reviewed by several professors in Fudan University to make sure that they are safe and practicable for undergraduate students to proceed. Meanwhile, inside our time, we also have a regular examination about lab-safety issues every week.

In detail, our projects are free of toxic or pathogenic or other harmful microbes. Our experimental objects are E.coli (Top10, DH5α) and tumor cells which is used commonly in labs and they are all in strict control. Our project ideas focus on harmless modifications and rebuilding, never can they cause biosafety problems under such strict and scientific control.

As for potential environmental pollutions, we prevented all the bacteria leakage. Every piece of culturing plate, forceps, glove and other tool will be sterilized completely or packed and put in the specific spot for proper management. All the laboratory waste are autoclaved before disposal.

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

None of our new BioBrick parts (or devices) will raise any safety issues. Our team has documented five parts this year and all of them are safe to be applied in E.coli. We are pretty sure that none of these five BioBrick parts are infectious or toxic to human beings. In fact, some of them are assembled with widely used parts in iGEM; some are normal promoters which has already been studied scientifically and proven safe; the last one is a modified protein coding part which is absolutely Non-toxic.

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

In order to make sure our work is secure and efficient, we do have such groups to supervise our team in our institution. Firstly, our team advisers asked several teaching experiment instructors to form a temporary “iGEM biosafety review group” when we started to proceed wet experiments. Secondly, we also have two students (in turn) exam all the experiment procedures, reagents, instruments and experimental material safety. Thirdly, in Life Science Institute of Fudan University, there are professional examinations for every lab, including ours, every month. These examinations mainly care about the correct use of instruments, lab safety, and other management.

In sum, all three organizations mentioned above can ensure us to conduct experiments safely.

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? I think we could add “dangerous-sequence-monitoring” features to “partsregistry.org”. In this part, we can put a certain number of common risky sequence or parts into the “dangerous-sequence-monitoring”, and then exam every BioBrick part which is documented by groups. If any risky parts or sequences are detected, we can notice the particular team to pay high attention to this part. This will probably help to manage BioBrick parts in iGEM competition.