Team:OUC-China/Safety Implications

We have always been taking safety aspects into consideration.

1. In our design, 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 addition, we carried out strict laboratory management in the project. Every student needs to take the necessary protection measures when they participate in the experiment. All engineered bacteria must be completely sterilized before leaving the laboratory. At the same time, the resistant plasmid we use is easy to be lost from the population while in the absence of antibiotic selection pressure, so engineered bacteria cannot survive in the natural environment.

3. The purpose of our project is to build artificial organelles. Actually it is a kind of new carrier protein in prokaryotic cells. In order to prevent the risk of unpredictable creatures, we decided to only use GFP as anchoring protein to combine with artificial membrane, rather than any other protein with chemical catalytic ability.

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

5. 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.

6. In the whole experiment process, the storage and operating of different engineering bacteria have isolation specification. And different genetic circuit building work is assigned to different groups, in order to avoid genetic pollution caused by intercellular nanotubes, cell conjugation, transformation, and so on.