Biosafety

Overview

Biosafety is an essential aspect when taking part in iGEM, especially when you work with living organisms which could possibly get out of your application due to damage or incorrect handling. It is important to protect the population and the environment by developing and applying systems which address these aspects. There already exist several useful systems to prevent the bacteria from escaping or to kill the bacteria when they are outside of the device. To complement this, we constructed three systems which differ in leakiness and strength. We combined two common Biosafety ideas, an auxotrophic and a toxic gene product, in one device. Thereby the constructed Biosafety system takes the best of these two approaches and is therefore characterized by a double kill-switch system. This double kill-switch mechanism provides a higher plasmid stability and additionally a higher resistance towards undesirable mutations. In short: Our Biosafety-System is safe!

Application

Biosafety of the MFC is based on several layers. First of all, the device we designed is a closed system, thus preventing escape of E. coli into the environment. If the physical containment, i.e. the MFC, is breached, lack of proper inducers which should be absent in the environment, results in the production of a toxic protein. Finally, presence of a plasmid encoded alanine racemase in E. coli strains lacking a chromosomal copy of this enzyme enforces plasmid stability without the need of additional antibiotics. For detailed information about using the MFC in actual and future applications see our Application site.