Safety

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Safety

Before answering these questions on your team Safety page, be sure to read the Safety in iGEM page. and the FAQ section below.

Key questions

For iGEM 2012, teams are asked to detail how they approached any issues of biological safety associated with their projects. Specifically, teams should consider the following questions:

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

 

Teams, please document any answers to these safety questions on your wiki safety page. Judges will be asked to evaluate your project, in part, on the basis of if and how you considered and addressed issues of biological safety. If any questions arise regarding iGEM and biological safety please send an email to safety AT igem.org.


Contents

Question 1: Why does iGEM ask teams to address safety questions and screen projects?

iGEM safety questions and screening procedures are designed:

  • To protect team members as they work in their labs, iGEM institutions, the general public and the environment
  • To encourage team members to consider safety, health, security, and environmental implications of their projects, both within and beyond the scope of iGEM competition.

FAQ

Question 2: How does this work? Does anyone actually read answers to safety questions and review project wikis?

Members of the iGEM Safety Committee and Graduate Safety Screeners review all safety pages and project wikis for consistency, identify potential safety issues and contact iGEM teams and external advisors if additional information is needed. Teams may be disqualified if they do not demonstrate that their projects are safe.


iGEM Safety Committee:

  • Todd Kuiken, Synthetic Biology Project, Woodrow Wilson Center, Smithsonian Institution;
  • Piers Millett, UN Biological Weapons Convention, Implementation Support Unit, Geneva;
  • Kenneth Oye, Engineering Systems and Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology;
  • Megan Palmer, Deputy Director, Practices, NSF Synthetic Biology ERC, Stanford University;
  • Sam Yu, Biosafety Officer, Hong Kong University of Technology, Clearwater Bay, Hong Kong

Graduate Safety Screeners:

  • Shlomiya Bar-Yam, MIT,
  • Julie MacNamara, MIT,
  • Ralph Donald Turlington, MIT

External Consultants:

  • Rocco Casagrande, Gryphon, former Director UNMOVIC Biological Lab;
  • George Church, Harvard Medical;
  • Chan-Wha Kim, President Asia-Pacific Biosafety Association and Korea University;
  • Michael Imperiale, U Michigan Medical and NSABB; Allen Lin, Cambridge University;
  • Scott Mohr, Chemistry, Boston University;
  • Pamela Silver, Harvard Medical


Question 3: We need clarification on the safety questions. Would you please provide guidance on each iGEM safety question?

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

  • researcher safety,
  • public safety, or
  • environmental safety
Guidance:

There are three recommended steps in addressing this question.

  1. To start, please list organisms you are using and organisms from which your parts are derived, indicating the risk group or biosafety level for each. For help, see Table 1 and 2 of the [http://www.who.int/csr/resources/publications/biosafety/Biosafety7.pdf World Health Organization (WHO) Laboratory Biosafety Manual]. You are welcome to use your national standards if you prefer. If national standards do not use the WHO 1-4 scale, please provide a link to an explanation of your standards.
  2. Then consider risks to team members, publics and environment if the project goes according to plan. Please describe risks posed by lab equipment and chemicals as well as biological parts and organisms. How are you addressing these issues in project design and lab work? Have you received biosafety training and other laboratory safety training? If so, please briefly describe the training.
  3. Then consider risks to team members, publics and environment if the project does not go according to plan. What are risks if safety measures such as containment procedures go wrong and organisms or parts are released? What are risks to security from malicious misuse? How are you addressing such risks?

Our projects are mainly associated with pollution reduction and endosymbiosis. For discussing the safety issues connected with our project, this assessment will start by listing the organisms and biobricks we use, and develop in compliance with the guideline of iGEM Safety page correspondingly. The following organisms are species which we derived our biobricks from or practiced transformation and cloning. This list includes Desulfovibrio desulfuricans, Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1, Dictyostelium discoideum, Escherichia coli, Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803, Synechococcus elongatus PCC7942 and Synechococcus sp. PCC7002. None of the listed organisms is pathogens. On top of these new biobricks, we used some previous parts. Without a doubt, these parts from iGEM kits are considerably safe. Since our project is related to contaminant water, exhaust air and heavy metal, we need to thoroughly examine every process of the experiments we conduct. Under the instructions of our tutor, all transmissions and operations of biological materials meet the relevant laws and regulations. As a result of the heartily suggestion and assistance of our laboratory fellows, we developed a series of experiments to demonstrate our project without violating any national regulations or university requirements. The details of our experiments are available on the Experiment page.


2. Do any of the new BioBrick parts (or devices) that you made this year raise 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?

The new BioBricks we submit are different reductases from organisms mentioned above. Nitrate, nitrite, nitrous oxides reductase and derived from Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1. Thanks to Prof. Hwan-You Chang from National Tsing Hua University, we operated the transferring and cloning on purified genomic DNA. Therefore, we didn’t need to cultivate P. aeruginosa PAO1. The biobricks related to nitrogen reductase are ultimately transfected into the genome of Synechococcus sp. PCC7942, and all of the according procedures followed the strict regulations of BSL 1 (Basic Biosafety Level 1). The same operation standard (BSL 1) is also applied to experiments of the sulfate reducing enzymes derived from P. aeruginosa PAO1 as well. In addition, the sqr (sulfide quinone reductase) from Synechococcus sp. 7002, and like other biobricks mentioned above, it is expressed in Synechococcus PCC7942 following the same requirements too. Since there is little safety concern according to the properties of our new biobricks, we deduced that the new biobricks we submitted is safe and harmless as long as the experimenters follow the basic regulations of BSL 1.

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?

Center of Environmental Protection and Safety and Health is in charge of promoting and managing the safety and health issue in National Yang-Ming University. The following links will direct you to the website which contains regulations of biological safety issues. http://ces-e.web.ym.edu.tw/front/bin/ptlist.phtml?Category=5 Though most of our projects are considerably safe, one of our sub-projects involves in the manipulation of Cadmium ion, which is restricted under the local regulations. With the help and advice of Center of Environmental Protection and Safety and Health, we conduct our cadmium related experiments in accordance with the associated rules.


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?

Last but not least, Soil Cleaner, our sub-project about collecting Cadmium, contains several interesting design to avoid gene flow and limit the leakage of artificial organisms into environment. To deal with unwanted gene exchange, we took advantage of previous biobricks and put the engineered E. coli into created apartments inside amoeba. As for constraining the Soil Cleaner in the contaminated area, a death switch is designed to restrict amoeba from migrating to nature. The details of these designs would be available on our Project pages. Furthermore, instead of using traditional endogenous plasmids to transformed cyanobacteria, we cloned our biobricks into vectors that will recombine with homologous genomic DNA alternatively. Thus, horizontal gene transfer is avoided and improve the security and safety of our project.

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