Team:Harvard BioDesign/Safety

Safety!

Human Practices

This summer we worked in the Joshi Laboratory at the Wyss institute. It was a BSL-1 laboratory because we were working with non-infectious laboratory strains of E. coli. We work on open benches with latex gloves, often using Bunsen Burners to sterilize the areas around where we are working.

We understand that curli is a pyrogenic agent, and can induce a potentially harmful immune response in humans. As such, any deployment or application of our information storage system would have to take precautions necessary to prevent contact between the curli-containing system and any open cuts, sores, or other points of access into the human bloodstream. 

One question our team considered this summer was the potential spread of our transgenic plasmids into an ecosystem in which the system might be deployed. If this system were to be deployed, a number of strategies could be used to prevent the spread of our genetically engineered plasmids into the environment. Given that our system takes advantage of multiple distinct plasmids, we could engineer each plasmid to express a gene product that induces the other plasmids to express products that ensure they are kept in the cell (i.e., various antibiotic-resistance genes). That way, if one of the plasmids escaped from one of our engineered cells into a wild-type cell in the environment, it would find itself without the inducers necessary to allow it to be duplicated and kept by the wild-type cell it had entered.