Team:Grenoble/Human Practice/BSS

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iGEM Grenoble 2012

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Design of the BioBrick Safety Sheet (BSS)

Synthetic biology is a new and emerging discipline with a lot of potential but also with an important part of risk. But unlike other disciplines such as chemistry there is no standard and reliable way of assessing risk!

Where does every component of our Biobrick come from? What was its initial function in nature? Should we fear a particular interaction with another component? Has a particular mutation been observed? These are the question that each biologist has asked himself at least once but couldn’t find an answer because it’s too complicated and exhausting!

To release your pain the Grenoble Team has found a solution: What about a new reliable and universal way of storing all these information and including them in the registry part? Thus every team and every biologist would be able to have access to these information and even add his own observations and experimental results to enlarge the database.

To sum up, the Biobrick Safety Sheet includes mainly two sections:
  • A section where we specify the biobrick , the origin and the initial function of each component in nature (promoter, rbs, coding sequence…)

  • A section that lists: the random interactions we encountered during the construction, the results of at least one experiment that considers the environment in which the biobrick will evolve and other experiments we think it’s important to consider in order to assess the biobrick risk level.


So, if every iGEM team cooperates and accepts to fill the BSS, over years, the iGEM community will have access to a large biobricks database with the possible interactions for each biobrick in different environments. This will help have a deeper idea of the biobrick potential risk and thus enhance safety in synthetic biology.

Furthermore this BSS was also designed to help teams to communicate with other laboratories during their projects. Indeed what has to be done when no information are available is to create contact with people that are experts in biology and synthetic biology. They may have another point of view than iGEM team members, and this can be an advantage for the project as well as the improvement of the safety. But if we wanted to have fruitful links with other partners, we had to put in place a way to communicate that was understandable for both. And the BSS was also great designed for this.

Other teams opinion about BSS:

As we want the BSS structure to be clear and concise. We tried early to contact as many iGEM teams as possible from all over the world in order to have feedbacks about the idea and the possible improvements for the BSS. For this purpose we used matchmaker click here by posting a request. We’ve also sent an e-mail to all the European teams.

You can find below the list of the teams that consented to give feedbacks.


We've already had feedbacks about the BSS from Virginia, Edinburgh, Groningen and Paris iGEM Teams


What appears is that many other teams think that the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, gives already many information that the BSS also gives. Thus it is considered by many teams as another way to store the biological information. What was blamed , is that there is no link between what already exists and this new sheet. Moreover some of those teams said that this BioBrick Safety Sheet could be seen as a competitor to the preexisting Registry…

Because of these feedbacks we managed to revise our project. Indeed our goal is not to set up a concurrent system, but more to improve what already exists.

Helped by other teams, we saw that it would be an utopia to have teams using directly the BSS. That is why we worked on a way to link our idea to the Registry of Standard Biological Parts. A way to do it would be to add another tab on BioBrick webpage that could be named Safety. In this part all the information about the way the BioBrick has been used environments in which it would evolve would be listed. In addition, drawbacks and bad effects that appeared would be explained.

But in the same time, it seems practical to keep the sheet available for teams, if they need to communicate on what they are doing or using. We should not forget that the website is free for everyone. Therefore other people and especially non biologists can have access to the information. This tool would be then a way of improving the comprehension of synthetic biology for the uninitiated.

Why is this important?



This approach is important because a lot of projects intend to use microorganisms outside laboratories. it is essential to make research on protection means. But it is even more necessary to know which hazards we should expect. Therefore having information on what would happen makes protections more efficient.

Add to this, if we take a look at the number of iGEM teams that have competed since 2006, we notice that it is increasing steadilyand if the raise keeps the same we should have almost 350 teams in 2018.



Considering that each team uses around 10 BioBricks for their project, the number of BioBricks used each year would easily reach 3500.



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