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.