Team:USTC-China/safety

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Q1：Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of: researcher safety, public safety, or environmental safety?

A: All of our team members had safety training and our operation is according to the safety instructions. We use E.coli and Caulobacter crescentus in our lab and both of them belong to Risk 1 Group, so it's safe relatively as long as we follow the rules in our lab. The protein we expressed is also innocuous. Even if it's mishandled accidently, any negative effect upon researchers, public or environment would be neglectable.

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Q2：Do any of the new BioBrick parts (or devices) that you made this year raise any safety issues?

A: The fluorescent proteins and the chromoprotein are widely used, so none of the new biobrick parts that we made this year raise any safety issue.

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Q3：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?

A: Professor Zhi-Gang Tian is responsible for biological safety at our institution. Yes,we have been discussing the possible risks like gene pollution and the healthy of people in the lab. Professor Tian had suggested us that we make a duty report to supervise the regulation in our lab to prevent the possible risks and it works well.

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Q4：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: The resistance gene of our E.coli may cause genetic pollution. As antibiotic-resistance genes are commonly used as markers during plasmid construction, there is therefore major concern that their presence in environment released GMMs could contribute to the generation of antibiotic-resistant 'superbugs'. So we think maybe we could use auxotrophic bacteria for our screening in the future work.