Team:Calgary/Safety

Our project does not raise any safety issues beyond the standard safety concerns of working in a molecular biology wetlab for the researcher, the public or the environment since we are not working with any cytotoxic BioBrick parts (beyond the cell death gene ccdB used for negative selection during the construction of BioBrick circuits).

While there is a Biosafety group that focuses on the safety and well being of researchers as well as an ethical review board at the University of Calgary, neither of these two entities were concerned about the potential safety issues arising from our project. As we were dealing with Escherichia coli as our model organism, ethical approval was not required for our project. Furthermore, since E. coli is used as a standard chassis for genetic engineering, only standard Biosafety and WHMIS training was needed for our team to carry out our research. Finally, as mentioned above, we do not feel that any of the BioBrick parts that we have submitted to the Registry raise any safety issues. Nonetheless, we do recognize that while creating a synthetic bacterial cell-to-cell communication system shouldn’t bring the issue of safety into the picture, our system might be coupled with other systems that could be used for harmful applications. Indeed, coordinating the behavior of entire populations of bacteria in a way that might be used for bioterrorism or other harmful applications is an issue that we have examined in our ethics paper as well as our Second Life Ethics conference.