Team:Utah State/Safety/Form

Safety Form

1. Your Training

a) Yes, we have already received safety training.

b) In safety training we were introduced to the chemical hygiene principles, hazard recognition including chemical, biological, radiological, and physical, hazard evaluation and control, chemical storage, Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS), protective equipment (including personal protective equipment), laboratory safety practices, standard operating procedures, chemical spill response, laser and radiation awareness, and the different types of hazards and their corresponding symbols (like oxidizers, corrosives, flammable solids and liquids, etc.). Each member was also trained on how to use a fire extinguisher and was required to put out a small fire with one.

c) http://rgs.usu.edu/ehs/htm/training (click the Laboratory Safety Initial tab)

2. Your Local Rules and Regulations

a) Utah State University has an Office of Environmental Health and Safety. Currently, we have not discussed our project with them, but will plan to in the future.

b) http://rgs.usu.edu/ehs/htm/programs-and-services/biological-safety

c) http://osp.od.nih.gov/office-biotechnology-activities/oba/rac/Guidelines/NIH_Guidelines.htm

3. The Organisms and Parts that You Use

See submitted excel sheet

4. Risks of Your Project Now

a) Some possible risks from working with the biological materials in our lab include: infection in immune-compromised individuals and skin irritation/inflammation from bacteria or enzymes. To minimize these risks, team members take a required Lab Safety course and wear gloves/lab coats/goggles when handling biological materials. Team members do not participate in lab activities with untreated, broken skin. Also, safety is reinforced when team members are first taught the basic laboratory procedures that involve biological materials.

b) Horizontal gene transfer may occur between wild type bacteria and the genetically modified laboratory strains. For our project, we are using laboratory strains of E. coli and producing harmless enzymes such as lipases, fluorescent proteins, chlorophyllase, etc.

c) Horizontal gene transfer may occur between wild type bacteria and the genetically modified laboratory strains. None of the genes that have been selected for our project have shown any negative effects on the environment.

d) Our team will be working with proteases as part of our project. Though these specific enzymes are not inherently hazardous to humans, a malicious attempt to alter the protein structure could result in different enzymatic activity which could prove to be injurious.

e) To minimize these risks, we handle biological materials with care, wash our hands before leaving the lab, and autoclave all biological materials before they are properly disposed of. Our team has chosen to use laboratory strains of E. coli (XL1-Blue and BL21) to ensure minimal risk in all areas previously described.

5. Risks of Your Project in the Future

a) With any biotechnology scale-up, larger and more powerful equipment will be needed to culture the volumes of bacteria necessary for more bioproduct formation. This presents additional risks to those who will be working to maintain the bioreactors and other instruments (e.g. pressurized tanks, caustic chemicals/solvents, and greater potential exposure to engineered bacteria). The environment may also be at a greater risk due to the large scale production facility, from an increased carbon footprint to a larger potential for engineered bacteria to escape outside of the labs. The methods we develop involve harvesting microbially-produced bioplastic that has immobilized enzymes attached to it. If individuals with malicious intent were to biologically attach harmful enzymes or viruses in a similar method and then distribute it into a population, this could present a health concern. But, these methods already exist for attachment to plastics and/or other materials, so we do not anticipate that we would be adding to a potential problem in any way.

b) Our project does not currently include any design features to reduce risk, besides the use of laboratory safe strains of E. coli and physical containment for growth experiments. If we were to expand this project into a popular product, we may decide to incorporate our genetic constructs into the E. coli genome to reduce the chance of horizontal gene transfer through engineered plasmids. Also, by incorporating a "kill switch" we could have a population of bacteria which would perform autolysis upon producing enough of the desired product.

6. Further Comments

We have designed and received primers in order to slightly alter several previous Registry parts (in the non-coding regions). Bioplastic production has been shown in E. coli using genes that were taken from the Registry and were approved for the distribution kit.