General Safety and Bio-Safety

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

    All our work is supervised by PhDs and professors of our university who are very experienced in practical lab work and are currently working in fields related to genetics / molecular / cell biology. We have documented our work in a physical lab notebook to enable replicability and prevent unnecessary errors. This lab notebook was handed at the end of each week to Professor Dr. Jansen (who has supplied us with one of his laboratories) who therefore was always informed about our work.

Our project does not pose any dangers to researchers or the public: We are following widely used lab protocols in an appropriate lab facility (biosafety level 1 laboratory). The single organism used in our project, namely Escherichia coli (TOP10 strain) is very well-known and considered safe if handled properly. Our project, the enzymatic removal of blood group antigens from erythrocytes in order to create universal donor blood, did never at any point involve contact between GMOs and a patient. We have always planned to extract and purify the relevant enzymes from accordingly transformed E. coli cells and to immobilize these enzymes on a glass matrix via the methods discussed in this wiki. One of our top priorities was to ensure that no enzymes were detached from the matrix during antigen removal since this would have contaminated the blood with potentially allergenic bacterial antigens. We have discussed ways to prevent the detachment of enzymes for theoretical large scale applications of our project but we never have planned to expand T-ECO over lab-scale.

We are working at a biosafety level 1 laboratory, which implies several methods for guaranteeing safety to researchers and environment are constantly enforced but research is limited to well known and nonhazardous species.

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

    We have designed and created 4 new BioBricks this year. 3 of them are enzymes that are capable of modifying blood type antigens and 1 is a bacterial intein. All of the protein-parts we have created are expressed in wildtype organisms and - although some of these organisms as a whole are dangerous - are not known to have any harmful effect on humans or other organisms themselves.

Which specific biosafety rules or guidelines do you have to consider in your country?

    In Germany any work with genetically modified organisms is regulated by the "Gentechnikgesetz". There are different biosafety levels ranging from 1 to 4 with 4 being maximum security. Our lab has been registered as biosafety level 1. Our work matches the definition of level 1 since based on our current understanding we see no threats on human health or the environment originating from our work. Genetically modified organisms are allowed to be released into nature only after permission from the Umweltministerium (Department of the Environment) and once freed they need to be monitored constantly.

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?

    Parts that are able to induce apoptosis or autolyis could be expressed under promoters that are activated if a specific substance is lacking or present in an uncontrolled environment as opposed to a lab. As an example 2011's team of UCL London had a concept for autolysis that could be of value. Last year BGU Israel's iGEM team has developped a "Programmable Autonomous Self Elimination"-system which also could be useful in this regard.