Team:Shenzhen/Biosafety

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 baking yeast strains. We have undertake conventional molecular biology experiments, and gene gun experiments, whose protocols are harmless to researchers. All engineered strains have been inactivated when experiments were accomplished, by sterilization equipment of BGI Research Institute.

- Besides, we have designed and worked on the YAO.Suicider subproject, to engineer a bio-safety device in Yeast Artificial Organelle and make the engineered strains commit suicide until producing enough production.

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

- No. Most of our BioBricks are signaling devices, transportation devices and reporters, which are innocuous, including TOC complex and mtGFP. REX, HOLIN, as the rest coding proteins we constructed, have been used by former iGEM projects and proved to be innocuous too.

• 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 giving several presentations to those experts, Prof. Yang given an opinion that our project is practicality and 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 when necessary.

- Parts and devices which could raise safety issues should be significantly marked and documented detailedly.

Bio-safety Device

YAO.Suicider, is one of our sub-projects, for bio-safety purpose. As expected, YAO could work as an organelle factory. Engineered strains with YAO inside may have potential threats to natural environment. So YAO.Suicider has been designed to let the engineered strain commit suicide, when production is nearing completion.