Wet-Lab-Project Safety

In addition to the general lab safety, we talked to the safety advisor on our campus, Dr. Willi Siller, with whom we double checked the feasibility of the project concerning its safety. One of his first questions was, which biosafety-level our donor- and chassis-organisms were ranked in. For the chassis-organism, this question was easy to answer, as we only used different strains of E. coli K12 and hence they all are ranked S1. As far as the donor organisms are concerned, the list is longer. However, all of them are categorized as S1, except for D. acidovorans, which is ranked S2 in Germany if used as a chassis-organism.
This classification is due to the fact that D. acidovorans is capable of causing inflammatory diseases such as endocarditis. Still, we can well justify the work with D. acidovorans on the strength of two aspects: Firstly, we never use D. acidovorans as chassis-organism and secondly, upon research, we spotted that the pathogenicity of D. acidovorans is based on proteins belonging to the Omp-family. The genes, that encode for those proteins are on a different locus than our genes of interest – the Del-cluster.
Consecutively, we can conclude that the work with either of the organisms we use for our project carries any risks for neither the experimentalist, nor for non-participants, if good laboratory practice is adhered to. As far as the peptides is concerned, we can state confidently that none of the peptides that we synthesize in our project are toxic or in any way hazardous. Tyrocidine is harmful to human blood and reproductive cells, but will never be used as entire peptide (i.e. only several amino acids) and was, besides that, publically available as antibiotic.
Within our project, we however intend to share knowledge with the broad scientific community and introduce a new and efficient way of in vivo production of short peptides via NRPSs. The framework of NRPS of course allows production of various peptides, and hence it is imaginable that this system is accidently or intendedly used for the synthesis of perilous products. There is however a straight-forward justification for either of the aforementioned dangers: Firstly, to avert unintended production of hazardous substances, we intend to include several precautions within our software, which is elaborated on in the according section. Secondly, someone contemplating malicious abuse of our proposed framework, would also have the chance to produce the dangerous substances by chemical synthesis.
As we, in our project intend to offer a more efficient way of recycling gold from electronic waste, we consider the implications of our projects for the environment a central point in our safety considerations. This reaches from the basic avoidance of contamination, which we ensure by good laboratory practice, to learning from and discussing with professionals about biosafety and precautions for the environment during an ABC-defense training (atomic, biological and chemical weapons) at the German Armed Forces. Please refer to our Scientific Outreach, for further details on that.