Team:Paris Bettencourt/Safety

Safety Training and Lab Rules

At the beggining of the competition, all team members recieved a Safety Training for working in the Biosafety Level 1 laboratory. This training as conducted by the Biosafety officer for INSERM U1001 and it included best laboratory practices as described in the WHO laboratory biosafety manual. It included rules about protocols in the lab, protective clothing and equipment, decontamination methods and practices, prevention of the transfer of genetic material and microorganisms, handling of chemicals, use of machines and emergency procedures.

Biosafety issues

The strains we are working with are E. coli, Corynebacterium and . All of them are classified in Biosafety level 1.

One of our projects includes the sampling of human microbiome. After doing research, we found no legal issues or specific authorisation in order to do so. There is a consent form we ask people to fill before taking their samples that includes information about how we will use the data and the protection of private information.

Human skin microbiome might contain Staphilococcus aureus in 20% of the cases. This organism can cause blood infection if introduced in the human body. Therefore, we extremely careful with these samples and always wear protection such as gloves, coats and glasses and decontaminate the bench we are working with. Nobody working with these samples is immunoedpressed or susceptible to develop a severe infection.

None of the organisms that we have genetically modified represent a higher risk than the wild types, that are already known to be harmless. The modifications that we introduce make bacteria produce volatile compounds -that are useless for themselves- or to degrade molecules present in the human body. These modified strains do not gain a fitness advantage and would probably be outcompeted in any ecological niche by the natural bacterium. We understand that these engineered strains would not be able to efficiently spread in the environment of they were released. Also, we do not think this project could have a malicious mis-use.

- Bacillus subtilis, Biosafety level 1
- Corynebacterium Glutamicum, Biosafety level 1. We used it as control for the electroporation

The organisms we used

Here is the spreadsheet about all the biobricks and the bacteria we used for the project.
For our experiment we used 4 different kind of bacteria :
- Escherishia Coli, Biosafety level 1
- Bacillus subtilis, Biosafety level 1. This bacteria have been used for the Goody Two Shoes project. We used it as a test because it is the main bacteria involve in foot odor. We only used a wild type strain and three strains with differents knockout.