Brief answers to safety questions

Welcome to our Safety Page. We will first answer the safety questions asked by iGEM headquarters briefly, and then discuss safety issues associated with our project in detail. In addition, we will provide our ideas and practice on guaranteeing and developing biosafety.

Q1. Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of: Researcher safety, public safety, or environmental safety?
No. Our design is based on the commonly used nonpathogenic E. coli K.12 strain and genes we manipulated are original genes in E. coli. The protein products, at least from current understanding, will cause no harm to researchers, the public and environment. In addition, strict lab practice is executed to further ensure safety.


Q2. Do any of the new BioBrick parts (or devices) that you made this year raise any safety issues? If yes, Did you document these issues in the Registry? How did you manage to handle the safety issue? How could other teams learn from your experience?
Yes, we will discuss this question in latter part of this page (Safety Considerations of Our Biobrick parts and Our Project).


Q3. Is there a local biosafety group, committee, or review board at your institution? If yes, what does your local biosafety group think about your project? If no, which specific biosafety rules or guidelines do you have to consider in your country?
Yes. All materials obtained have received the approvals from the department's laboratory management committees. We are also obliged to observe the regulations of Teaching Centre of Experimental Biology and apply for approval for materials before we start our project.


Q4. 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?
Some classified measures should be taken according to the safety of the material. For example, plasmids that may harm the safety, when submitted, should receive more attention and have a stricter package. Some harmful byproducts during experiments should be eliminated properly.
We have done our human practice aiming at understanding attitude of the public towards genetically modified baceria and publicizing biosafety ideas to the public, which we think should be popularized to other teams in future iGEM competitions.

safety issues evaluation

As stated above, all the organisms and DNA hosts are not of high individual or community risk. Until now, E. coli DH5α is the very one organism we have used in our experiments. Our current lab of basic-biosafety level 1 is safe enough to deal with E.coli. To manipulate the strain, an ultra clean cabinet is used and strict aseptic techniques are followed. Every member of us have been strictly trained on fundamental microbiology techniques and biosafety. All microorganism containing vessels are sterilized before and after use following appropriate protocols. Also, materials containging any microorganisms will be sterilized before discarded. In this way, we guarantee that no public or environmental harm will be caused by the experimental organisms, and that no one in our team will get hurt during the experimental process.
The genetic modifications we bring in will alter the expression of bacterial genes. However, these genes are merely designed to test the functions of elements we have constructed in order to achieve goals about gene activations. No evidence, both theoretically and experimentally, shows that these changes may improve the pathogenicity of the bacteria or may cause any damage to exterior environment, even taking into consideration the risks of horizontal gene transfer. Although specific consequences of expressing dCas9 and various gRNAs, regarding infectivity and pathogenicity on E. Coli, are not clear now, it can be securely handled in our lab without any posible human ingestions. Further details about gene safety can be found in relevant parts on our wikipage.
We have also examined the potential nocuities of diverse chemicals and equipments as listed below:

• • Basic molecular experiments:
         NaOH, HCl, SDS, acrylamide, TEMED, ethanol, IPTG, Restrictive enzymes from NEB, GelRed, Agarose, TAE buffer, 10XLoading buffer, BSA, 1kb DL2000 plus DNA marker, Gibson assembly reagents, CaCI2
• • Bacteria culture:
          ampicillin, kanamycin, chloramphenicol,Tryptone, Yeast extract, NaCl
• • Equipments:
          UV lamp, centrifugal machine, heating equipments (alcohol burner, PCR amplifier, water bath, dry bath), electrophoresis apparatus, -80℃ refrigerator, ultrasonic cell crusher, constant temperature incubator, shakers, microwaveoven, ice machine.

All of these are common reagents and apparatus in any molecular laboratory. Potential risks may come from inflammability, explosibility, irritation, corrosivity, toxicity, carcinogenicity or physical injury. Moerover, antibiotics of merely trace amount are used in our lab and more importantly, only after special treatment will they be discarded in the end. Nevertheless, equipped with chemical hood and emergency shower, we can, without doubt, protect ourselves from any kind of injury. Thus, none of them raise special safety issues.

Our project has past a review of an expert committee, of which the members are professors or associate professors of microbiology, genetics and bioengineering. Safety issues are considered seriously before they finnaly approved of our project. Our lab is supervised by Teaching Centre of Experimental Biology, Wuhan University (TCEB, whose leader is our instructor Dr. Zhixiong Xie). An expert group of this centre formulates safety guidelines and guarantees their implementations in all teaching labs. All experiments we have done have also past its review. Our safety management system includes the followings: Management of Chemicals, Equipments and Experimenters. Chemicals and equipments are purchased instead by TCEB and are also under tightly management. Equipments are checked and maintained regularly and an entrance guard system is brought in to ensure that only formal members can enter the lab.

• •Responsibility distribution: In order to minimize potential injuries, each member must be aware of the experimental process from close observations. And then, tasks will be arranged to them by our group leader who have received strict training in his own lab. More importantly, every member records details of his/her experiments in a notebook which will be checked regularly. Each member takes responsibility of cleaning and checking risks in the lab. What’s more, we have a special guy who reports regularly on safety and daily function of our group to Miss Long Yan, who is authorized by TCEB.
• •Management of Chemicals, Equipments and Experimenters: Chemicals and equipments are registered in TCEB before they are available for us.
• •Training: Our team members have been trained after Guidance of Student Experiments formulated by TCEB.








Biosafety and Publicity


We believe that biosafety is not an issue which should be only considered inside biological lab, but also around people and communities. Spreading knowledge of biosafety to the public will help eliminate misunderstanding and prejudice, from which both the science and the public will benefit. We hope that sharing this idea with all iGEM teams can finally make a difference when it comes to biosafety.
To investigate public attitude towards our project and to publicize our ideas about biosafety are what exactly we do in our human practices. The rational discussions of biosafety we have with the public are not limited on our project, but also hotspot issues such as transgenics and stem cell therapies. Considering that our human practices include forms like public presentations, forums with other iGEM teams, and science exhibition to the broad audience in Wuhan University, our team is definitely trying hard and doing well. Auxiliary details about our fantasic human practices can be found on our wiki and thanks for your attention.