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 the implementation of a software (similar to past iGEM teams) integrated in the parts registry, where an automatic analysis and detection tool for toxicitivity / pathogenic would be run for all new BioBricks sequences uploaded. This way, if a team is designing a dangerous part, the analysis result would show them a warning message and they would be informed in advance, placing the test result in a visible section of their Biobrick page at the parts registry, otherwise disposing the part or discontinue working on it.

Figure 4. A small step for a molecule, but a big step for safety.
Source: Markus Schmidt (2010). Xenobiology: A new form of life as the ultimate biosafety tool. BioEssays 32:322–33.

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.