Team:Warsaw/Safety

Laboratory strains of E. coli and B. subtilis are not pathogenic, thus not hazardous. Bacillus strain carrying a plasmid with listeriolysin might be hazardous, so great care must be taken. But even if one does become infected, these bacteria are unable to replicate and survive inside mammalian cells for long. They are also incapable of spreading from cell to cell, meaning that infection could not spread.
None of our project's ideas can cause public safety hazard. We are not going to transform our multihost eucaryotic vector into invasive Bacillus strain, to ensure that no danger is caused. Listeriolysin might raise some issues, that is why we adopted rigorous safety protocols concerning disposal of biological waste, to prevent any GMO organism from breaking loose and spreading into environment.
None of the Biobricks that we use this year may cause any environmental hazard. Plasmids containing genes coding resistance for antibiotics such as ampicilin, chloramfenicol and kanamicin might be hazardous if released into environment, enlarging population of antibiotic resistant bacteria. To ensure that this does not happen we adopted safety protocols, as mentioned above.

Work in a microbiology laboratory environment:

We work with GMO in our lab, particularly E. coli and B.subtilis bacteria strains. Researchers have to wear lab coats and gloves.
Work with toxic chemical compounds:
Ethidium Bromide can cause cancer - it is used only to visualize gels and is not added to agarose gels before running the electrophoresis.
Antibiotics: Chloramphenicol and Ampicillin:
While dissolving the antibiotics in the form of powder the mask and safety glasses have to be worn.
Work with UV light:
UV light is a cause of cancer therefore a UV protective mask, gloves and lab coats have to be worn while working with the UV light.

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

In our invasion device we use previously created listeriolysin BioBrick (BBa_K177026), which could be potentially harmful if someone was careless enough to get infected by a bacteria strain carrying this device. Even in this case the danger is limited as strains we use are unable to spread from cell to cell and it is impossible for them to last long in mammalian cells as it was mentioned before. We minimalized the risk by thorough application of our safety protocols.

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

There are no local biosafety groups, committees or review boards at the Polish universities, but Polish Government issued a number of guidelines for conducting work with GMO and we are doing our best to follow them. All necessary permissions to work with GMO were obtained by the Department where we work. Concluding, all our laboratory work is in full agreement with appropriate law acts and nothing we do could be viewed as illegal.

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?

In our opinion it would be a good idea to not include an invasiveness operon in DNA distribution. There have been in the past situations when there was an error in putting BioBricks in assigned wells. As invasiveness operon is potentially harmful, we think that it would be safer not to include it, unless there is an absolute certainity that there was no mistake while preparing the plates. We would like to suggest that procedures of distribution kit preparation should be improved when dealing with potentially harmful BioBricks. We know that iGEM HQ are doing their best and it is very difficult to put together so many kits without any errors but we still think that some of this parts should be prepared with greater care in order to avoid dangerous mistakes.