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Team:Berkeley/Safety
From 2012.igem.org
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1. Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of: researcher safety, public safety, or environmental safety?
In our experiments we used only non-pathogenic organisms: Saccharomyces cerevisiae and a typical lab strain of "Escherichia coli". The fluorescent proteins used for tagging yeast organelles can be found naturally various organisms including Discosoma sp. (blue mushroom corals) and have been widely expressed in various organisms. These proteins are not hazardous either in their native organism or when expressed in yeast or other organisms. Even is mishandled, any negative effects upon the researcher, the public or the environment would be expected to be negligible.
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?
None of the BioBrick parts submitted to the registry raise any unique or substantial safety issues. The fluorescent proteins themselves are widely published and available, along with the targeting sequences. We contemplate no biosafety or biosecurity issues with potential dual use of these parts.
3. Is there a local bio-safety group, committee, or review board at your institution? If yes, what does your local bio-safety group think about your project? If no, which specific bio-safety rules or guidelines do you have to consider in your country?
UC Berkeley has bio-safety rules regulated by the Environmental & Health Safety (EH&S) office as well as the Committee on Laboratory and Environmental Bio-safety (CLEB). Their list of rules are outlined http://ehs.berkeley.edu/healthsafety/biosafety/researchguidelines.pdf. Our project has been approved by EH&S after processing a document called the Biological Use Authorization (BUA), which asked us to outline our project and discuss any possible safety concerns our project may present. The BUS content is available here.
In the US, the CDC works with the National Institutes of Health to publish national biosafety guidelines.
Each member of our lab received biosafety training before the project began. This included general laboratory safety, radioactive material user training, biosafety, laser safety and hazardous and chemical spill training. These training sessions are put on by EH&S, and they offer them regularly in the form of a two hour lecture, as well as an online presentation and quiz. Furthermore, each member of the iGEM team was trained by our iGEM Graduate Student instructor on proper lab techniques and safety procedures.
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?
We believe that integrating bio-safety regulations into general design workflow would make the development of parts, devices and systems safer. To this end, design tools that consider safety would be invaluable.
