Team:TU-Eindhoven/SafetyiGEM

Contributing to greater biosafety awareness and biosafety within the iGEM teams' projects

biosafetyFigure 

After a thorough analysis of our project in terms of biosafety, we reached the conclusion that there are two main aspects that could be improved in the following editions of the iGEM competition to ensure safety within iGEM projects and raise safety awareness at iGEM.

To raise safety awareness at iGEM:

• A summary on safety locks implemented by teams in the previous years, including the most common safety mechanisms implemented and the main issues encountered, along with the solutions they came up with for those problems. This summary should be available in the iGEM webpage for all teams to consult it. By providing this information to the teams, it would be easier for them to know what sort of safety mechanisms have already been implemented in previous years and if they are also applicable to their project or not. Furthermore it facilitates the access to the information already available in the iGEM webpage, taking the teams in the right direction towards the implementation of safety locks within their own projects.

To ensure safety at iGEM projects:

• Implement measurements to avoid an immune response in projects where the GMOs are intended to work within the human body.