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From 2012.igem.org

Our final product does not contain an antibiotic resistance marker. This is a main concern for environmental safety. Even in a worst case scenario, if our food warden bacterium is released into the environment, the plasmid will not provide an advantage for survival above the natural biodiversity. Nor could any genes potentially transferred to other bacteria give those bacteria the ability to become virulent or dominant over other bacteria, which in turn could endanger the biodiversity. The ability to produce a pigment will waste valuable energy of the bacteria and could in some cases be toxic for the cell. The strain we will use for our final product will also not threaten the biodiversity in the environment, because this strain a natural strain and already in the environment. For more insights of the safety aspects of our product we invited prof. Elsas, a member of COGEM and expert on the environmental aspect of biosafety.