Team:Shenzhen

From 2012.igem.org

Team:

This is an 8-college consortium, whose members are participated in internship (Innovation Classes on Genomics) with BGI Research Institute in Shenzhen, China. Students from eight different universities have contributed to this project, including:

Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Sichuan University

Wuhan University

University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

South China University of Technology

Southeast University

South China Normal University

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Project: Yeast Artifical Organell

Synthetic biologists have been engineering genes and pathways in the cell to let it perform functions they desire. However, these man-made pathways incorporated in cytoplasm may suffer inferences from the original genes and pathways within the cell. Eukaryotic cells have organells that separate important pathways from that in the cytoplasm. Thus we want to make our own organells that perform the designed function. There has been some works on man-made organells, however this year the team of Shenzhen plan to create our man-made organell and apply it to organic synthesis by engineering yeast mitochondria, which we call Yeast Artificial Organell, and YAO for short.

Bio-safety Questions

1. Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of: researcher safety, public safety, or environmental safety?

- No. All our experiments are based on commonly used E. coli and yeast strains. All strains have been inactivated when experiments were accomplished.

2. Do any of the new BioBrick parts (or devices) that you made this year raise any safety issues? If yes,

- No.

3. Is there a local biosafety group, committee, or review board at your institution?

- Yes, there is a group of experts working on bio-ethic and bio-safety in BGI Research Institute, leading by our advisor Prof. Dr. Huanming YANG. After listening to our ideas, they have given an opinion that our project is innocuous.

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?

- An expert in bio-engineering, who can also work as an advisor, is expected to each team, to guide them dealing with strains and DNA fragments, if necessary.