Team:Columbia-Cooper-NYC/Safety

Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of:

researcher safety?

public safety?

environmental safety?

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

did you document these issues in the Registry?

how did you manage to handle the safety issue?

How could other teams learn from your experience?

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

Genspace has an Advisory Board consisting of experts in biosafety, biosecurity, and genetic engineering who hold positions in academia, industry and government. They serve as our Institutional Biosafety Committee. The portions of the project to be carried out at Genspace are strictly BioBrick construction and the construction of plasmids containing metal-binding peptides and other non-pathogenic sequences. This is within the project parameters recommended by our Advisory Board.

[http://genspace.org/page/Advisory%20Board Advisory Board Members]

Interim Lab Safety Rules

Cooper Union does not have an Institutional Biosafety Committee, but the project has been reviewed by David Wootton, Ph.D., Director of The Maurice Kanbar Center for Biomedical Engineering and is being supervised by Jody Grapes, Campus-Wide Safety Officer for Cooper Union.

Students participating in this project received safety training (general/chemical/biological) either at Genspace or Cooper Union prior to beginning the project. The safety training consisted of a presentation covering the various aspects of safety found in molecular biology laboratories; i.e. proper microbiological techniques, safe disposal of recombinant organisms, etc. Upon completion of the presentation, students were shown the location of all safety equipment i.e. eye wash stations, first aid kits, fire extinguishers and safety exits. Students were also supervised by iGEM instructors at Genspace or Cooper Union throughout the duration of the project.

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?