Team:CAU China/Safety

Part 1: Lab and Reagent Safety

（1） reagents safety Question:

What are the main reagents used in the experiment? Is it toxic? Where do you get it? How to store and use these reagents?

Answer:

The main reagents includes PCR reagent, plasmid preparation reagent, nuclease and ligase ect.No reagents is toxic.Kits what we used are bought from BioTeke, Takara and NEB with safety instruction.

（2） materials safety

Question：

What are our materials? Are they harmless and in accordance with the safety standards? Where do we get them?

Answer:

a. Gene and plasmid

(1) adh1 from Neurospora crassa (Nadh1, cDNA, gift from He lab);

(2) adh2 from Saccharomyces cerevisiae (Sadh2, cDNA, gift from Lou lab);

(3) ta0841 from Thermoplasma acidophilum (ta0841, commercially synthesized CDS, BGI Crop);

(4) expression vector pET-28a(+) (Novagen).

b. Bacteria strain

The bacteria strain includes E.coli DH5α, JM109, BL21(DE3).They all are gifts from Chen lab.

（3） product safety

Question：

What is the product we have? Whether it will be a security risk?

Answer:

The product includes PCR product, plasmid extract and enzyme, they are not dangerous.The final product what we want to get is Alcohol dehydrogenase, it is a kind of protein which is easily degraded in non low temperature under natural environment, so it is safe.

（4） instruments safety

Question:

What are the main instruments used in this experiment? Which company we buy from? Is there any problem before we use it?

Answer：

The main instruments includes:

(1) tubes, Petri dishes, spreader, knife, micropipette, tips; Bechtop;

(2) DNA gel electrophoresis apparatus; UV transilluminator;

(3) Incubator, Shaker; PCR thermocycler.They all are bought from Sigma company.No problems and dangers.

（5） experimenter standardization

Question：

Did we get some scientific research training before we began this experiment?Did we keep the safety notice in the lab?

Answer：

All experimenter are trained and instructed by our professor,we keep the essential notice in the lab as standard;

(6) laboratory safety

Question:

Is our laboratory in accordance with the national safety criteria?Which safety level is our lab?

Answer：

Our Inovation lab meets the requirement of national safety criteria, and it is of AAA level.

Part 2: Biobrick Safety

Question：

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

Answer：

No single biobirck parts we made this yeat arise safety issues.

Part 3: Safety Committee

Question:

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?

Answer：

There is a biosafty group at our institution.They evaluate our project of high safety.

Part 4: Enviromental Safety

Question:In this experiment,does it have a negative effect on the enviroment?What measures we have taken to protect the enviroment?)

Answer：

All the material, reagent and apparatus are commonly used in almost every molecular biology lab. As a result, our project has little environmental side effect and we manipulate this equipment according to the lab standard.

Part 5: Project Safety

Question:

Did we notice the hidden safety trouble in this project? Have we checked our project principle?

Answer：

We have checked our project principle several times and take the safety problem into consideration. Since we add a genetic circuit to lyse the bacteria, there is no safety problem as far as we could think.

Question：

Are there any dangerous manipulation in this project?

Answer：

All the manipulation are common and safe, and we use the apparatus according to the standard instruction.

Part 6:Application Safety

Question：

What is the product we want to get?Where do we want to apply it?Weather the safety problems will appear in the process of application?

Answer：

We aim to develop an alcohol-detoxic beverage containing our acid-resistant lactobacillus which could survive in our stomach and metabolize alcohol.Lactobacillus is a healthy bacteria in our daily milk, so there is no hazard problem;.To make our product more safe, we try to introduce a genetic circuit responsible for cell lysis.

Part7:Suggestion

Question：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?

Answer：

We suggest that IGEM should establish a filter system from a known database,so it can decrease the utilization of genes that are highly dangerous.And IGEM should have their own inspection department which can make regualar check-ups.Lectures regarding biosafety are also encouraged in IGEM Jamboree.