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

• researcher safety,
• public safety, or
• environmental safety?

No.

As our team, SEU_Omega, aims to execute a synthetic biology project based on colony of bacteria, We focus on the biosafety issues that may be raised by bacteria and certain toxic chemicals applied to during the process of transformation, abstraction, PCR and other necessary steps.

Biological parts include certain kinds of bacteria, which contains the original competent cell BL21 ,DH5α or some simple modulated engineering bacteria, and standard kits from iGem 2012 distribution plates. These parts are widespread in modern synthetic biology experiments and have been proved harmless to people in the laboratory.

Other potential harm may come from chemicals for gel electrophoresis or other molecular biology experiments. At the very first days, Ethidium Bromide (EtBr) was used to stain DNA for gel electrophoresis. Although toxic and a known carcinogen, ethidium bromide’s harmful effects can be avoided by avoiding direct skin contact. However, as further experiments were conducted, harmless substitutes were found and used.

Moreover, ultraviolet (UV) light was used in visualizing stained DNA in gel electrophoresis. In order to get rid of the harm of UV, blocking shields were put out for protection from start to end.

During our whole process of project, no pandemic pathogen was ever used and all related chemicals were carefully taken care of, no matter before, during or after the experiments. We have tried our best to confirm that no harmful substances can be brought out into public or outer 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?

No.

Our idea concerns the control of the pattern of colony, which would utilize light sensing as a switch to manipulate the differentiation of cells and a quorum sensing system of AHL would govern the holistic pattern with antisense RNA effecting the division rate.

All these parts were tested on the level of bacteria and would not effecting the normal rate of other species under non-labarotory environment.

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?

Yes.

We do have several professors and advisors supervise our experiments during our iGem process. All new experiments would be weighed on safety by experienced teachers before execution.

In addition, we have meticulously refer to the rules made by Experiment Center of Biomaterial and Biotechnology. For further information of this set of rules, please visit the website:

http://www.lmbe.seu.edu.cn/cailiao/guizhangzhidu.html

Finally, according to the Safety Administration Regulation on Genetic Engineering made by National Biosafety Office, our project pertains to Level 1, which is harmless to people or environment. For further information of this set of rules, please visit the website:

http://www.biosafety.gov.cn/gjzcfg/flfg/200401/t20040115_88044.htm

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?

From the initial design of our system, we have begun considering the problem of biosafety for our project. The application of the light sensor is just similar to a protection switch for the whole system. No continual step would be taken without the expression of this very first promoter and obviously, the physical condition of light can be easily manipulated by any laboratory.

As a matter of fact, we have already set the goal of biosafety as one of our research orientations. We have been trying to fabricate such a new composite part that can be used as a total switch of the whole system. An absolutely new specialized design consists of a light sensor as a promoter and a division repression(such as Minc) part as a function.Once put into use, it may repress the cellur division as long as there is blue light and therefore make the continual transgenic experiment meaningless under blue light.

Moreover, we recommend that a special tag should be added to the plasmid to distinguish the characteristics of each sample. This would require the classification of parts based on their potential danger.

Last but not least, the database of parts and devices can be updated into such a form that the input and output of parts can be expressed more clearly. Clearer classification would lead to more convenient design to avoid biosafety problems.