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Biosafety
From 2009.igem.org
SAFETY
1. Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of : • researcher safety, • public safety, or • environmental safety?
- No, it doesn’t actually raise any safety issues since we are not that far in or project ideas. In our lab, we just work with E. Coli bacteria strains (DH5alpha, TOP10) because we couldn’t reach the rat experiments. Moreover, we have taken necessary precautions in our lab as we reach further in our experiments. Firstly, we never start experiments before cleaning our laboratory with ethanol and wearing our gloves and lab coats. Furthermore,experiments are performed by giving necessary information to our equipment. For safety, the experiments which include working ETBr have been performed under very seperate region. The glasswares and pipettes which have been used for ETBr, aren’t used for other experiments. Moreover, while working with dangerous materials, we are always supervised by two graduate and two Phd students. Our project, Wound Dressing actually raise safety issues about cancer and microbial infection. However, when we deeply search about the cancer and its relation with our project, we find out that cancer doesn’t depend on EGF amount. It depends on the EGF receptor amount . Since we are just increasing the EGF amount, as our most society knows the opposite, there is no cancer risk. In addition to this, for microbial infection risk, we have taken many precautions. Our embedded switch mechanism, granulysin protein and the polyurethane layers provide enough safety and these precautions are approved by authorities of university. The other two project ideas, bacteriaflow and bactoplus also don’t raise any safety issue since they are both require working only with bacteria.
2. Is there a local biosafety group, committee, or review board at your institution?
- Actually, since the meetings of our biosafety groups do not meet in very short term periods, our project ideas are not discussed at a meeting. However, we have planned meetings with all the academic personal who may be responsible from safety in his/her field. We have arranged meetings with most of these personnel and they applied that our ideas and works apply the safety rules.
3. What does your local biosafety group think about your project?
- Every single member of biosafety member has approached suspicious to this issue;since, we interfere with the actual healing mechanism. However, when we explain the procedures and the precautions, they apply what we have done so far.
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?
- The BBa_K258010 of our biobrick part has raised suspicion because it is known to induce cancer in most society. However, when we talked about this part with academic staff who is making research about cancer, they have guaranteed that in most cancer cases, the problem is about the receptors; not the EGF protein . Therefore, because we mention in this page, we do not need to mention about this issue about the part’s page since it may be counted as unnecessary information. The other parts of us do not raise any safety issue.
