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From 2012.igem.org

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Revision as of 08:44, 23 September 2012

Human Practice We appointed biosafety as our theme for human practice. As a very significant part of our project, several activities have been conducted to fulfill our arrangements. First of all, we carefully examined the details of the biosafety questionnaire and decided to conduct a survey on the biosafety issue at our own school. Observations were made during our regular experiment process over this issue and we’ve found out several fundamental requirements as well as limitations on our laboratories. With the supervision of several professors and graduates, we got some basic ideas on lab biosafety issue even at the very beginning of our experiment process. One key point lies in the separation of bacterial, DNA and RNA experiments, which should be essential to modern integrated biological laboratories. Adding to that is so basic a point that it is often neglected by us, and that is a proper classification of preserved bacteria as well as a compact remark on the lab items. The neglect would easily evolve into pollution and destroy the experiment. The limits, however, are obvious, due to limited funds and conditions, some disposable equipment are in fact infected and reused several times. Also, the aseptic technique is not always met up with the standard. In conclusion, though with the reference to a relatively standard biosafety standard, there is still some place to improve at our lab process. Secondly, in improving the actual safety standard in modern biology, we try to construct a new general transgenic vector. The principle is rather simple: using light condition to manipulate the growth of colony. We have successfully constructed a rather high efficient division repression biobrick and we design a special part consisting of a light sensor and this division repression biobrick. Unfortunately, the fabrication of this small system has not been finished yet due to lack of time. But once the connection is successful, a promising general biological tool would emerge. Imagine the circumstance where the colony is exposed to certain length of light and then died automatically. What the experiment executers need to do is to add specific light (physical) condition to the colony. When the experiment finished, an exposure to normal solar light would directly make the colony die and prevent pollution from the laboratory and therefore improve the biosafety standard. Apart from focusing our attention on biosafety issue, we have done some other things to publicize synthetic biology. In August, we issued a short video to introduce the history and basic ideas of synthetic biology. In September, we delivered a lecture on the theme of synthetic biology, together with SEU_A team and teams from Nanjing University. In the final analysis, our human practice is focused on biosafety issue but also put some attention on the improvement of this general subject as well as this competition. We are just trying to combine what we are doing as our system with the improvement of biosafety standard.