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Biosafety

Working with microbes, natural or recombinant biological materials are essential and inevitable parts of our experiments. While our team members enjoy their labs and experiments, the Biosafety committee at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) was closely monitoring all of our research activities and took great care to ensure that all procedures carried out in the lab are conducted in such a way as to protect human health, communities and the environment.

As for our project, it mainly involves plasmid constructions and simple genetic modifications. These molecular level activities were practiced cautiously within the laboratory and they are only related to the regulation of protein expression, speed control in the E.coli systems. There were no releases of any reagents that will pose biosafety threats to the environment or individuals of the project. All conducted procedures followed the biosafety policy and guidance details regulations that were disturbed by the biosafety committee when we received safety talk and lab training before entering to the laboratory.

Regarding the safety of our biobricks parts, all of our biobrick parts code for non-harzardous molecules such as streptavidin, specific translational repressors and devices for motility control. Those constructed plasmids and transformed bacteria are limited to laboratory uses only and they are not released to the environment nor applied in human trials.