Team:UANL Mty-Mexico/Safety/ideas

Do you have any other ideas how to deal with safety issues that could be useful for future iGEM competitions?

Yes, in fact we can think of several ideas that could be consider for future iGEM competitions, one of them is an essay required for all participating teams about their project concerning synthetic biology, biosafety and ethics, regardless of whether or not the project has major biological problems. It will require not only thinking and reflection on all the issues involved, also it will help them answer the safety questions more accurately and appropriately; the objective of this essay is to aware iGEM students about the risks, what they are creating and which entails a synthetic biology project.

We propose an implementation of new software, where each iGEM teams should run the software analysis and detection tools for toxicitivity or pathogenic criteria in all their BioBricks, and clearly post the test result to the wiki’s section of biosafety. This way, if a team is performing a dangerous part, the analysis result would show a warning sign and they could be informed in advance, placing the record in a visible part of their wiki and the relevant information related to that part in the registry part, otherwise disposing of part or discontinue working on it.

Last but not least, another way but slightly futuristic is start using XNA "xeno-nucleic acid" (Schmidt 2010), iGEM teams could use different molecules with similar functions that allow us store information, therefore there could be less risk of horizontal transfer or interference with other living organisms, while working with synthetic biology projects.