Team:SUSTC-Shenzhen-A/Safety

Safety

As a software team, our team work does not include any wet lab part. Nonetheless, we take safety into account as well as measures from a variety of aspects.

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

Researcher safety:

As a team working out software program, our main problem of this part is the radiation-effect of computers while all the members are programming. For health of programmers and ergonomically working, we formulate several rules such as limitation of working time (the upper limit is 8 hour) and team members need to relax their eyes by taking a walk of view scenes every hour.

Public safety:

Our projects are set in iPhone OS, whose underlying code can't be changed by user, leading to almost antivirus. Besides, with our hard work and the serious examine and verify of app store, the possible error has been estimated and reduced to guarantee user informations. We also aware to show a concise and academic user interface which has no academic irrelevant content.

Environmental safety：

We solemn promise that we didn't have or create any experiment product which can effect the environment.

2 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?

As a software team, we didn't make any BioBrick. and no safety issues happened from this.

3 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?

Our university is a new university and there is no biosafety committee, but we do consult our professors of Department of Biology during the programming progress.

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?

For safety development in dry lab, we notice that there are few safety rules for programmers. As software is also an essential part of bio research, the safety of both programmers and program need to be concerned.

For safety development in wet lab, the copyright of Biobrick is also need to be protected.