Team:PKU Beijing/Project/Safety

Safety

Safety is an important issue when we conduct experiments. iGEM officials require every team to answer some questions concerning about safety. Here's our answers.

• Q1 Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of researcher safety, public safety, or environmental safety?

The system we designed and contructed is composed of three modules, including information processing, memory and reporting modules, which are very common elements in bacteria. We have placed the three modules on two or even three plasmids, and the possibility that the modules are accidentally integrated into bacteria genome is rare. If horizontal transfer between bacteria still happens, it would not bring any hazard for the following reasons. First, the reporting module is obvious safe for it only produces GFP. Second, the transfer of the information processing and memory modules would not cause any danger because it senses small molecules in the environment as input and generates CI regulatory protein as output. Any structural mutation in these modules would lead to the function failure of the whole system. As a result, we believe that our project would not raise any safety issue in terms of researcher safety, public safety, or environmental safety

• Q2 Is there a local biosafety group, committee, or review board at your institution?

As far as we know, there is no such agency related to biosafety at our institutions, including the College of Life Sciences, Peking University. We have discussed about this with our dean and he said a biosafety group, or committee will be set up soon.

• Q3 What does your local biosafety group think about your project?

N/A

• Q4 Do any of the new BioBrick parts that you made this year raise any safety issues?

No, as explained in Q1, our system is composed of three modules which are very common elements in bacteria. New biobricks made from these elements don't have the capability of raising any safety issues.

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