Team:NCTU Formosa/Project/Safety

For iGEM 2009, teams are asked to detail how they approached any issues of biological safety associated with their projects. Specifically, teams should consider the following four questions:

1. Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of: researcher safety, public safety, or environmental safety?
2. Is there a local biosafety group, committee, or review board at your institution?
3. What does your local biosafety group think about your project?
4. Do any of the new BioBrick parts that you made this year raise any safety issues?

If yes, did you document these issues in the Registry?

Experimental Safety

In our university, National Chiao Tung University (NCTU), the Environmental and Safety Center (ESC) is strictly responsible for Safety of all labs in the school. What we can do in our project should follow the rules they permit, and they manage all instruments and chemicals, especially for dangerous and toxic ones, in all labs. The ESC is to be informed on the basis of our project and on what we are doing and plan to do. Therefore, the ESC has permitted our project at first.

In addition, we do our wetlab activities in Common Instrument Rooms where are in charge of Biomedical Engineering Lab of Dr. Chih-Sheng Lin and Applied Microbiology & Biochemistry Lab of Dr. Ching-Ping Tseng. They would check whether the rules are followed or not everyday, and every time someone starts to work in these rooms, he or she should take down his or her student numbers in a log. Besides, when someone uses a common instrument, he or she should record the purpose for the instrument.

Briefly, under these requirements, the progress for our project would not raise any possible safety issues.

Safety Issues for Researcher, Public and Environment

As above we mentioned, we did our work under the control, so in fact, we did not get hurt during working. Our work also is harmless to the public and the environment. Since after we had finished our progress for a day or a step, we always dealt with the contaminated trash carefully. This is the most important in our work.

Almost Biobricks we used are from MIT, and only somethings new we made and modified from previous Biobricks in 2008 iGEM works ourselves. Actually, these new and old Biobricks are very safe, and the details of mechanism in our ideas can be found here