Team:Nanjing-China/Safety

1.Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of: Researcher safety, Public safety, or Environment safety?

Our project’s idea is safe itself as long as observer rules and the law, though our idea is about transgenic and potentially therapeutic vegetable. Because all the need to know, selling any kind of this food with approval by agents like FDA is a bad idea.   

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

No, the BioBrick parts we made this year is used to transfect lettuce and make it produce artificial micro RNAs. Both of these two technologies are mature and relatively safe. Of course, as we know, it is always a dangerous ideas to sell or spread a transgenic food strain without control.

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

Yes, as our team is supported by the Department of Life Science in NJU, the department reviewed all our plans prior to our experiment.  We started experiments only after their approval. However, lack of training or lack of biochemistry background knowledge can cause safety problems by undergraduates. Monitoring by supervisors or graduate students and enough training has minimum this possibility.   
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?

Yes, there are different safety issues in plant synthetic biology. Plants do not need special environment to survive and spread. And the danger it brings is slower and not easy to notice. It is necessary to have a universal signature system for all transgenic plant created by future iGEM teams.  We try to solve this problem by the Barcode2 parts and its rules.Details is in the page of Practices, and project Barcode 2.