Safety

Safety Training

Safety is an important aspect of the iGEM project requirements; we understand that and take safety training seriously. As a software team, we do no work in any wet lab capacity, but just as safety training teaches best practices and behaviours in lab, we have used our safety training to employ best practices and behaviours in developing software. We have covered topics including but not limited to: using GitHub, commenting/documenting code, and how to abstract/re-factor code.

As a team, we were really interested in Wet Lab testing (and validation) of our work. Unfortunately, given that this is our first year at iGEM and hence we received limited funding and resources, we had to prioritize certain other tasks over wet lab work. We'll still likely be involved in UCSD's iGEM team next year, and will push for additional funding and resources to make wet lab testing possible.

We did not use formal lab safety materials as we did not work in any lab at all.

Who is responsible for biological safety at our institution?

Department of Environment, Health & Safety at UCSD. The project has not been discussed with the department as we anticipate no safety hazards. You can find the biosafety guidelines of our institution here.

Also, you may find the regulations that govern biosafety in general in research laboratories in the United States here.

Risks of our projects in the future

This project has been constructed exclusively in silico. Therefore, we anticipate no risk or safety issues for our team from any wetlab experiments. However, as we are only developing software and not interacting at all with any biological components, we cannot foresee any new safety risks in combining pathogens in any new and novel way. Working and constructing new and novel biological circuits are at the risk of the experimenter. We cannot accept responsibility for any kind of hazards or risk arising from the results returned from our work. The safety of our fellow scientists is one of our utmost priorities, hence, any lab that wishes to use SBiDer for their own research purposes must, at all times, keep the biosafety regulations of their own institution and country in mind.

Click here to view our completed safety form.