Team:ULB-Brussels/Safety

Question 1

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

The organisms we used are the following Escherichia coli strains: MC1061, Top10, DH5α. They are not harmful to humans, nor can they easily reproduce outside of a lab setting. The parts used to produce Microcins B17 and C7 come from wild type Escherichia coli. Integrons and the integrase are found in gram negative bacteria. Since our project does not involve producing dangerous products, nor any modification that could be pathogen, there is no evident issues concerning public or the researchers’ safety, except the well-known risks of all molecular biology researches. If the project goes according to plan, nothing that we used for our project should get in contact with the environment or members of the public. However, we received specific guidelines on how to deal with laboratory tools and chemicals. Microcins have antibiotic activities and the integron could be an extremely efficient gene shuffling device. Thus, there might be some concerns for the environment if our project is used in the future to increase the production of toxic compounds like other antibiotics for example. The direct modification of the genome of the bacteria could allow more resilient phenotypes. One way to deal with such difficulties was to put the integron in a plasmid that can only be replicated in a specific E. coli strain.

The microcins’ genes come from two different operons : Microcin B17 and C7. Each BioBrick we made contains one gene of those operons. Alone, most of the genes are not an environmental issue, only the resistance gene of Microcin B17 might represent a risk because its function does not depend on the other genes of the operon. This will be documented in the Registry. We managed this issue by being extremely careful with how we manipulated our E. coli strains and BioBricks.

Yes, there is a biosafety committee specific of the ULB Institute of Molecular Biology and Medicine, which is our host lab. This committee authorizes or refuses any new project to be carried in the institute, including end of studies works and thesis, which is routine, except if the project includes, for example, the manipulation of pathogenic organisms. Since all DNA parts we designed were already used in different projects in our host lab, our project was considered routine and was not subject to any specific decision of the committee and obtained quite automatically the authorization to manipulate those DNA parts.

An iGEM ethic committee could be created in which one student from each team should take part. The aim of this committee would be to analyze or approve the safety of all projects and offer suggestions to improve the bio-safety.