Team:WHU-China/Safety

Brief Answers to the Questions

Welcome to our Safety Page. We will first answer the safety questions asked by iGEM headquarters briefly, and then discuss safety issues associated with our project in detail. As well, we will report our ideas and practice on guaranteeing and developing biosafety.

Q1. Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of: Researcher safety, public safety, or environmental safety?
No. Our design is based on the commonly used E. coli K.12 strain and genes we manipulated are original genes contained in E. coli The protein products, at least from current understanding, will cause no harm to researchers, the public and environment. In addition, strict lab practice is executed to further ensure the safety.

Q2. 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?
Yes, we will discuss this question in latter part of this page (Safety Considerations of Our Biobrick parts and Our Project).

Q3. 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. All materials obtained have received the approvals from the department's laboratory management committees. We are also obliged to observe the regulations of Scientific Training Room and apply for approval for materials before we start our project.

Q4. 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?
Some classified measures should be taken according to the safety of the material. For example, plasmids that may harm the safety, when submitted, should receive more attention and have a stricter package. Some harmful byproducts of researches should be eliminated after the competition if without further value for researches.
We have done our human practice aiming at publicizing biosafety ideas to the public, which is what we are really inclined to popularize to other teams for future iGEM competitions.

General Safety Issues

In this part, we will illustrate organisms, reagents and equipments we use that may cause safety problems, and introduce our operation standard, management and trains protecting the team members, public and environment.
As above, all the organisms and DNA hosts are not high individual or community risk. Until now, the only used organism is E. coli K.12 (and some of its varieties, for example, DH5α, a mutational strain weaker than wild type). Our current lab of basic-biosafety level 1 is safe enough to manipulate this strain. Only the genome (a generous present from University of Dundee iGEM team), but not the living Salmonella enterica was manipulated in the lab, and the genes from it are homogeneous of E. coli K.12, not associated with pathogenesis. We will not implement our future experimental plan with microorganisms of risk group 2 or vertebrates in our current lab, for too low is the biosafety level and no animal facilities.
To manipulate microorganisms, an ultra clean cabinet is used and strict aseptic technique is followed. All experimenters have been trained on foundation microbiology technique and biosafety. All microorganism contacting vessels are sterilized before and after experiments in appropriate protocols. Also, all microorganism materials will be sterilized before discarded. In this way, we believe that no public or environmental harm will be caused by the experimental organisms. In addition, no one in our team will be hurt by the experimental organisms.
The genetic modifications we make will change metabolism of bacteria. However, there is no evidence both theoretically and experimentally that these modifications will improve the survival capability of the bacteria in environment even taking the risk of horizontal gene transfer (most of which has been prevented by aseptic technique) into consideration. The gene adrA may enhance the infectivity and pathogenicity of E. coli, but it still can be easily controlled in the lab environment without human ingestion. Also, we will insert a death device into the bacteria cell when we construct the whole system (still far from now) to avoid the proliferation out of control. For more information about gene safety, please read the next section and documents of our relevant parts on registry.
We have considered the potential harmful chemicals and equipments, as listed below:
Basic molecular experiments: NaOH, HCl, SDS, acrylamide, TEMED, ethanol, IPTG, liquid nitrogen, β-mercaptoethanol, xylene cyanol FF.
Bacteria culture: ampicillin, kanamycin, chloramphenicol.
Chemical analysis and measurements: acetone, cupric acetate, Sudan III, Congo red, Coomassie Brilliant Blue G-250, Coomassie Brilliant Blue R-250.
Equipments: UV lamp, supercentrifuge, heating equipments (alcohol burner, PCR amplifier, water bath, dry bath), electrophoresis apparatus, -80℃ refrigerator, ultrasonic cell disruptor.
All of these are regular reagents and apparatus in a molecular biology laboratory. The risks of them come from inflammability, explosibility, irritation, corrosivity, toxicity, carcinogenicity and physical injury. But none of them raises special safety issue, with chemical hood, emergency shower, normal personal protection, safety management and safety training.

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