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1. Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of:
Researcher safety
The organism used in the project is E. Coli, which has risk group or biosafety level of one. That means that is almost unlikely to cause human or animal disease and, therefore, it is safe to use. In order to avoid risk by using e. coli, only capacity personal is allowed to work with it, also in case of accident e. coli cannot survive outside the laboratory where the temperature conditions are not controlled. The protein that is going to be synthetized derived for beauveria bassiana and it also belongs to the risk group one. Like any micro-organism, B. bassiana has the potential to act as an opportunistic pathogen, but as the literature study demonstrates, Beauveria infections are extremely rare events. Anyway, there is no need to work directly with, B. bassiana because is just an organisms from which the insecticidal part is derived.
Public safety
There are also some potential risks for the team members while they are working in the laboratory. The laboratory used is a basic biosafety level one only used for basic teaching and research; it is an open bench work. The only risk in this laboratory is that the team members do not follow the security rules for every laboratory causing an accident. To avoid this, all the team members have received basic training in laboratory equipment before lab work. If the project result as it is supposed to do, it must not be a danger for any public if the product is not ingested. If it is ingested, E. Coli will cause diarrhea and a little fever depending the patient.The risk of an accident inside the laboratory depends of the lever of care that the team members have during the practices. The biological parts and organisms represent a risk if they enter in contact with a body. We are working with E. coli strains that are specifically weakened for laboratory use. On the other hand, there are some equipment and chemicals that represent a danger if they are not used correctly. Some chemicals used in laboratory represent a safety risk so all members of the team were told to handle them with extreme care. The same goes for the lab equipment; some cannot be used without a responsible authorization.
Environmental safety.
About the environmental impact, the bacteria was modificated in order to synthetize a bioinsecticide that stop the growing or causes death of plague insects; that means that the population of the plague will be reduced creating, in one or another way, a change in the environment. The bioinsecticide will affect some families of the lepidopteran species; in order to regulate its impact we control its production with the termorsensor and with its fast degradation rate. Anyway it is difficult to predict its impact and danger because of the lack of information about this novel insecticide, but one we discover what other insects are exposed to the insecticide, we will be able to determine the amount that will be affected by it.
2. Do any of the new BioBrick parts (or devices) that you made this year raise safety issues?
Did you document these issues in the Registry?
How did you manage to handle the safety issue?
How could other teams learn from your experience?
3. Is there a local biosafety group, committee, or review board at your institution?
If yes, what does your local biosafety group think about your project?
4. 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?
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