What is biosafety?

Biosafety guidelines evolved as a protection for laboratorians in the field of microbiology to understand the risks associated with various manipulations of agents transmissible by different routes. Different biosafety levels provide increasing attention to personnel and environmental protection.

There is a definite hierarchy of controls that need to be in effect. Upper level management must set the general tone that safety is a high priority. Crucial to safe working conditions are the various types of specialized equipment available to serve as primary barriers between the hazard and the laboratorian. These range from simple gloves and other personnel protective equipment to simple (sealed centrifuge heads) or complex (biosafety cabinets) containment devices.

Biosafety and Bologna Team Project:

Requirements: "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:

Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of:

researcher safety,public safety, or environmental safety? Our project aimed to develop a circuit for expression control in E. coli. The only safety issue concerning our work is on the E. coli handling inside of a University Lab. where other people, and not only the iGEM team members, are currently working. For this reason, during the summer, we arranged not to put in danger anyone

Is there a local biosafety group, committee, or review board at your institution? The University of Bologna periodically schedules meeting and seminars on the biosafety and biosecurity topics for a good information of the people working in the University labs. Moreover, each laboratory has its own biosafety/security overseer to control that all the safety/security indications are fulfilled

What does your local biosafety group think about your project?

Do any of the new BioBrick parts that you made this year raise any safety issues? No

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

Teams, please document any answers to these (or other) safety questions in your presentation, wiki presentation, or poster.

Judges will be asked to evaluate your project, in part, on the basis of if and how you considered and addressed issues of biological safety.

Synthetic Biology is developing as one of the most exciting area of scientific discovery, but research has shown that the public is almost completely unaware of its applications.
Considering the technical nature of this area, there are many possible questions about the implications arising from its applications. All these questions are considered by Synthetic Biology which tries to use in a conscious and responsible way its techniques and promotes the objective of its studies transparently.

We decided to realize an Information Booklet explaining to people, even those that do not possess special knowledge in the Synthetic Biology field, what the 2009 Bologna Igem Team project is about. We distributed these booklets to students of the University of Bologna in order to collect their opinions and considerations once they have been informed in a few words on the basic concepts of Synthetic Biology.

In order to gather up these data we thought that may be useful to prepare a Survey and submit it to other students and friends, trying to “measure” the mistrust that those people can feel about our project and Synthetic Biology in general. If a large variety of people will answer to our questions, we could be reasonably sure that our data are indicative of the impact of our project on the public opinion.

Click on the following links to check the Information Booklet and the questionnaire:

Here the Results of Survey: