Safety Overview

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

1. researcher safety
2. public safety
3. environmental safety

Only team members and mentors are allowed in the laboratory to ensure public safety. All transgenic organisms are bleached before disposal in a bleach bucket. This keeps the amount percentage of transgenic organisms vacating the laboratory into the surrounding environment at a minimum. All who enter the laboratory have been trained to safely follow proper protocols. Our safety officer and his deputies develop MSDSs(Material Safety Data Sheets) documents in our independently developed services platform for our team members in order to aware the team of the dangers of reagents, chemicals, etc.

Do any of the new BioBrick parts (or devices) that you made this year raise any safety issues?

1. did you document these issues in the Registry?
2. how did you manage to handle the safety issue?
3. How could other teams learn from your experience?

Our newly developed BioBrick parts have absolutely no safety issues. Our parts are only comprised of flourescent proteins, promoters, RBSs, and inducer-coding reporter genes on top of antibiotic resistant plasmid backbones (psB1A3, pSB1K3, and pSB1C3).

Is there a local biosafety group, committee, or review board at your institution?

1. If yes, what does your local biosafety group think about your project?

2. If no, which specific biosafety rules or guidelines do you have to consider in your country?

Our high school's administrative faculty reviewed the project proposal and determined that it was safe.

Do you have any other ideas how to deal with safety issues that could be useful for future iGEM competitions? How could parts, devices and systems be made even safer through biosafety engineering?

A year before we started a synthetic biology team, we anticipated the need to develop and store important safety documents and laboratory protocols. To address the issue of safety, we successfully engineered a central repository for all MSDSs and laboratory protocols in a system known as CASP (Central Agency Services Platform). We are proud to say that have always presented our MSDSs on chemicals and reagents to the entire team before they were used in the project. At times when we bought chemicals in hurry, we had to use foreign MSDSs on those chemicals because we did not have any, but then we developed our own MSDSs of those chemicals on MSDSM(Material Safety Data Sheet Manager). Future iGEM competitions should begin to adopt our safety practices and develop a central iGEM repository of MSDSs of commonly used reagents. In the meantime, The Agency will gladly share our protocols and MSDSs, and aid to other iGEM teams wishing to establish and employing a safety system similar to MSDSM in CASP.