Do the biological materials used in your lab work pose any of the following risks? Such as risks to the safety and health of team members or others working in the lab, risks to the safety, the health of the general public and the environment, if released by design or by accident, risks to security through malicious misuse by individuals, groups, or countries.

Our experiments are carried out according to lab regulations and the strain that we use does not have pathogenicity. Our strain comes directly from the riverbed, a natural location. And it is difficult to culture.

If your project moved from a small-scale lab study to become widely used as a commercial/industrial product, what new risks might arise?

We have developed a device to increase the stability of RNA. If this device if to be widely used, it might be misused in a way to make some harmful RNA more stable.

Does your project include any design features to address safety risks? (For example: kill switches, auxotrophic chassis, etc.) Note that including such features is not mandatory to participate in iGEM, but many groups choose to include them.

1. We cloned the anchor protein and the cluster of magnetosome membrane onto two separate plasmids, so we can achieve the isolation between carrier protein and carrying protein. If the artificial gene cluster flows into the environment by accident, it will not carry the engineered anchor proteins, and won't cause harm to the environment.

2. In order to reduce pollution, RNA guardian module uses GFP-lva instead of conventional GFP, which can be degraded quickly.

3. In our RNA guardian module, in order not to introduce unnecessary artificial sequences, we used only natural sequences when it came to designing the interval between the two ribosomes.

What safety training have you received (or plan to receive in the future)?

All of our team members have received four months of lab safety training starting from December 2012 until April 2013. Members have been trained in aspects of basic biolab safety, lab apparatus safety and handling of harmful substances.