Question 1

Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of:

• researcher safety,
• public safety, or
• environmental safety?

Our research is conducted in a safely regulated laboratory, and the ideas of our project do not require etiologic agents, hosts or vectors for experiment. Also no toxic reagent or high risk chemical compound is used. In all, our project hasn’t yet raised researcher safety issues thus far. For we do not apply any virulent genes or etiologic agents, there seems no additional threats on public safety. Yet, the antibiotics resistance plasmid used in our project may harbor the threats of horizontal gene transfer, which will enhance the virulence of other Escherichia coli in the environment. Though a self-destruction mechanism is designed in our project, we are still aware of the risk on environmental safety. The rules and regulations of concern will be under close supervision of Environmental Protection and Occupational Safety and Hygiene Unit of NTUCM.

Question 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?

The most common question people would have judged us is how we make sure that it is safe to deliver this bug into human intestine. As we noted, the output we would like to deliver, GLP-1, is innate naturally and haven’t proven any significant harms to the human body. Cell penetrating peptides, which is another peptide we are going to deliver into gastroenterological tract, do no harm as well, since it has a pretty short half life (<15 mins) inside GI tract.

What’s more, intestine is an organ with an abundance of normal flora, mainly consisting of Streptococcus and Lactobacillus in the middle intestine. In ileum and section close to ileo-cecal valve, bacteroides and coliform bacteria are dominant. First, for the E. coli itself, it’s very hard to colonize in the GI tract as it would face a bunch of competitors over nutrients and space. Second, the bugs we are going to deliver inside human body is pretty fragile, which can be easily eliminated by some antibiotics, 2nd generation cephalosporin, high ampicillin plus sulbactam, or erythromycin, which is ideal of usage in our cases, since it not only provided anti-microbial effects, but also increases the motility of intestine. Above all, the design we are going to bring to synthetic biology community has little safety concerns, and can be easily circumvented or adjusted.

Question 3

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

• If yes, what does your local biosafety group think about your project?
• If no, which specific biosafety rules or guidelines do you have to consider in your country?

Question 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?

As our opinion, we think that for every iGEM teams' circuit design, a mechanism to turn off is necessary. In order to improve the iGEM competition safety concern, we suggested that a turn-off mechanism should become a requirement.