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From 2014.igem.org

Safety

1. Our Code of Conduct: “Science sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’ame”
F. Rabelais, 1532

We recognized from the start that any science project can lead to harm if there is lack of awareness of the risks or if necessary precautions are not taken. This harm can affect the researchers themselves, the public, the environment and also how communities perceive Science. None of these being desirable, we discussed, planned and applied before, during and after precautionary measures to minimize risk of harm.

Awareness

Our first step to minimizing risks in our project was a group discussion about the meaning of the word ‘safety’, what it meant to us, what it meant to the community and how we evaluate risk.

What is safety?

We started by looking at the definition; always a safe place to start.

Safety, noun, from Latin 'Salvus' 1. The condition of being protected from or unlikely to cause danger, risk, or injury.

Or in our own words, being safe is being aware and minimizing the probability of causing harm to ourselves and others.
We based our discussions on the IAP Principles for a code of conduct:

Awareness
Scientists have an obligation to do no harm.

Safety and Security
Scientists have a responsibility to use good, safe and secure laboratory procedures.

Education and Information
Scientists should be aware of, disseminate information aimed at preventing the misuse of biological research.

Accountability
Scientists who become aware of activities that violate the BTWC should raise concerns with the appropriate people, authorities and agencies

Oversight
Scientists with responsibility for oversight of research should promote adherence to these principles and act as role models in this regard

Technology and Biological Risks

Biological exists because natural and human biological manipulation far outstrip our ability to detect, analyse or respond to danger.

Marchantia can reproduce sexually as well as through this ‘fragmentation’, and is in fact dioecious, meaning that an individual plant is either a male or a female. When induced by a shift in ambient light to far red, which signals that other plants are looming overhead, strange mushroom-like structures begin to sprout from the top of each plant. In males, these eventually take the form of a flat polygonal table, in females, the sprouts become archegonia, which look like miniature palm trees and bear eggs.

The antheridia, as the male table-like structures are called, produce two-tailed sperm instead of the pollen you might expect. These are spread by rain to the waiting eggs of the archegonia , which they fertilise and induce to become hardy spores. These spores number in the thousands in each archegonium, which when twinned with the dispersal of gemma makes Marchantia very prolific.

The plants also have the ability to regenerate a whole new plant from a mere scrap of tissue, without the necessity of adding any hormones or other growth factors. Like in other primitive plants such as ferns, every cell contains a haploid genome except for a small amount of sexual tissue during the plant’s spore production stage.

These characteristics and the simple structure of Marchantia’s genome, which often contains just one gene where in higher plants (like Arabidopsis) are found complex clusters of genes of similar and overlapping functions, make it a fascinating plant to study. They also make it a chassis perfect for synthetic biology.