Safty Form

1 . Would any of your parts or project ideas raise safety issues?

No,The biological material used in our project are E.coli K12 and B strain, which rank group 1 in safety risk according to the ABSA. The main idea of our project is to regulate the expression of enzymes in the pathway of propionate synthesis by gene clone. Maybe it will burden E.coli thallus itself, but less threaten to researchers, the public or the environment.
As we want to make the microbe in human’s intestine function the same way as E.coli do outside the body in the future work, a lot of condition difference need to be considered. Firstly, we should make sure that E.coli K12 will not cause any pathema when they work in the guts. Otherwise, we will transform the genes to another microbe that belongs to intestinal probiotics.
We have also thought about the crowd psychology about the medicine with live microbe. After a small surgery on the campus internet, we found that most of them were reluctant to use microbe as medicine. But if we give them the example of yoghourt, vinger and distiller's grains (a kind of chinese sweet food, like congee,by glutinous rice fermentation).

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

No, we do not believe that the BioBrick parts made this year raise any safety issues. Our biobrick parts consist of an operon encoding four enzymes in propionic acid synthesis pathways and synthetic gene oscillator. The four genes are all endogenous in the E.coli K12 and the function of biological oscillator has been demonstrated in the reference paper.

3 . Is there a local biosafety group, committee, or review board at your institution?

Yes, there is a non-official group constituted by safety officer in every laboratory. They supervise everything related to safety like sanitation, reagent consumption, instrument application and even personal dressing.They will record the improper behavior and point out to warn the staffs in the regular meeting every week.

4 . 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?

Better documentation and standardization of parts is required. And some safety analysis tools should be extensively incorporated into synthetic biology models. Through human practices project, exploring different perspectives of synthetic biology by asking members of the public, as well as iGEM participants.

Outreach

1 . Publication awareness

This May,we volunteered to a local high school to introduce the advancement of synthetic biology. We told them about the iGEM jamborees and famous teams in the world. We were happy to see more and more students getting curious and excited about the missions of iGEM Foundations and the idea to combine cells with engineering and encoding.
Last November, after we had returned from Hongkong, we made a public speech in our school to report what we achieved, to share the feelings in the iGEM competition. After that, many students want to join us and make a contribution in the 2013-iGEM. We hope that our team will be inherited and become more and more influential.

2 . Corporation and share(with WHU&AHU)

There are three teams in Huazhong district this year：WHU, HUST, AHU. We have been keeping in contact ever since this April. There will be a comprehensive presentation in the mid of September, as what we are going to do in Hongkong.