iGEM Safety Questions

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

Researchers work with safety guidelines that must be uphold by any lab which will ensure them the safety necessary for working with bacteria. The project idea does not raise any suspicion of immediate danger, since we are not working with pathogenic bacteria or creating something that could potentially be pathogenic. But we are introducing something that isn’t endogenous to E. coli and which is connected to genetic regulation. We are aware that there are some E. coli strains that can present itself as an opportunistic pathogen under the right circumstances with a different set of active genes. Since the type of methyl-transferase we use isn’t present or used in E. coli and the genome of E. coli doesn’t contain any recognition sites we don’t expect any genetic alteration of E. coli through our project.

On the short term there will be no public interaction with this modified bacteria so the public safety is not an issue as right now. There has been some speculation about using our modified bacteria inside humans but since no real introduction of foreign bacteria has been successful this is not an option to us.

We regard the release of our modified bacterium in the environment as an important option for our project. Since our modifications would not make the E. coli pathogenic only the common restrains would be applicable to us. Keeping the replication and spreading to a minimum or using a mechanism to eradicate our modified bacteria is our aim.

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?

No.

Is there a local biosafety group, committee, or review board at your institution? If yes, what does your local biosafety group think about your project? If no, which specific biosafety rules or guidelines do you have to consider in your country?

No, there is no review done for biosafety at our institution. Otherwise we have to abide to the biosafety regulation of the Dutch government. This is monitored/organized by the RIVM and regulated via permits and GGO’s.

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?

When working with GMO’s or planning to create a GMO’s there should be easy access to any work already done on the matter or even an discussion panel active on the subject where project ideas can be posted and discussed concerning any threat or safety issues possible expected.