Team:Valencia UPV/Project/modules/biosafety

Project > Project Modules > Biosafety

"With great powers comes great responsibility." – Benjamin Parker (Uncle Ben).

We know the importance of keeping genetically modified organisms under control. Ideally, modified genetic material should be unable to spread and organisms containing it should be easily distinguishable from wild type. Keeping this in mind, we created a biosafety module to be used in plants which will be available for future iGEM teams working with plants. Our biosafety module combines two biosafety strategies: identity preservation and male sterility.

Identity preservation enables an easy identification of the genetically modified organism. We incorporated a chromoprotein, which provides a differential pigmentation to the plant, in the biosafety module. The implementation of this chromoprotein to our system is the result of the collaboration with NRP-UEA-Norwich , and it is also used in their project “Green Canary”.

Male sterility makes impossible the dispersion of genetic material using pollen as the vehicle or by seeds result of self-pollination. In order to achieve this dispersion restriction, we integrated the active peptide of barnase, a RNAse from Bacillus amyloliquefaciens, (Biobricks accession code BBa_I716211) under the regulation of the tapetum-specific promoter TA29 [1]. Both components are very well documented since TA29 has been used by a large number of researchers [2-6] and barnase has also been used under the regulation of different promoters [7,8]. We chose this strategy because it had been previously used in our laboratory with satisfactory results [9].

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