Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of researcher safety, public safety, or environmental safety?
This year UNIPV-Pavia Team project focuses on transforming lactose left in whey into ethanol to give it a second life and to transform a waste into something useful. None of the ideas we investigated involved particular issues for researcher safety, except for usual safety routines respected in every biological lab. We see synthetic biology as an opportunity, for this reason we wouldn’t have realized a project dangerous for the community or the environment. Moreover we engineered E.coli TOP10 strain that is completely safe if properly handled both for researchers and public and commonly used in biological laboratories.
Is there a local biosafety group, committee, or review board at your institution?
What does your local biosafety group think about your project?
Since standard safety routine were enough for this kind of work the biosafety board in our lab approved our project without any particular restriction and took care of students’ training in using devices and instruments.
Do any of the new BioBrick parts that you made this year raise any safety issues?
So all our BioBrick are safe and don’t raise any safety issue since they don’t produce or have been produced using plasmids/bacterial strains containing toxins or pathogenetic factors.
"
