"
Team:Harvey Mudd/Safety
From 2012.igem.org
| Home | Team | Official Team Profile | Project | Parts Submitted to the Registry | Modeling | Notebook | Safety | Attributions |
|---|
1. Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of researcher, public or environmental safety?
Our project does not raise any unusual public or environmental safety issues. We are only working with E. Coli, which is classified as a biosafety level 1 organism. All of our wetlab team members have received lab safety training, and standard protocols are followed for waste disposal. We are not using any toxin-producing plasmids. In general, we are following standard protocols which have successfully and safely been used in our school labs for many years.
2. Do any of the new BioBrick parts that you made this year raise any safety issues?
None of our new parts raise safety issues. They are only promoters and RNA-based repressors; we are not submitting any protein-coding sequence.
3. Is there a local biosafety group, committee or review board at your institution? If yes, what do they think of your project?
Our school biosafety committee says that our project "falls under the general biosafety umbrella of work already going on in those lab spaces". In other words, our methods, protocols, and safety procedures all follow established and time-tested precedents.
Do you have any other ideas how to deal with safety issues that could be useful for future iGEM competitions?
The best way to guarantee safety is to stick with standard procedures. The more people who have used a protocol, the less chance that there is an unknown risk. Since our innovation is in computational parts, we stuck with time-tested protocols for all of our wetlab work.
