Safety in iGEM
Safe Lab Work
All work for this project was done in Cooper Union’s Kanbar Laboratory. Here is some relavant information about our lab!
What is the safety level of your lab?
Level 1 (Low Risk)
Which work area do you use to handle biological materials?
Open Bench
Have your team members received any safety training yet?
Yes we have received safety training in the lab. The safety protocols that were covered fall under standard laboratory good practices. This includes no food and drink in our BSL1 laboratory, wearing nitrile gloves during experiments, minimization of aerosols, and the location of safety equipment such as eye wash stations.
Who is responsible for the safety of biology labs at your institution? What are the guidelines for laboratory biosafety?
Dr. Alan Wolf is responsible for the safety of all laboratory facilities at The Cooper Union. Our laboratory adheres to the guidelines for BSL1 laboratories found in: http://www.cdc.gov/biosafety/publications/bmbl5/BMBL.pdf.
In your country / region, what are the laws and regulations that govern biosafety in research laboratories?
Please refer to these links: http://www.cdc.gov/biosafety/publications/bmbl5/BMBL.pdf and http://osp.od.nih.gov/office-biotechnology-activities/rdna/nih_guidelines_oba.html.
What risks does your project pose at the laboratory stage? What actions are you taking to reduce those risks?
Presently there are only minimal risks associated with our project within a laboratory setting. We are working solely with K-12 derived strains of E. coli as a means for cloning our constructs and for expressing variants of the enzyme TdT, which itself has no known toxicity. All experiments are being performed in strict accordance with BSL1 guidelines and recombinant DNA guidelines as outlined in:http://osp.od.nih.gov/office-biotechnology-activities/rdna/nih_guidelines_oba.html and http://www.cdc.gov/biosafety/publications/bmbl5/index.htm
What risks might your project pose, if it were fully developed into a real product that real people could use? What future work might you do to reduce those risks?
If it were a fully developed product their may be considerable risk involved in individuals or groups being capable of synthesizing DNA simply and rapidly. This would definitely lower the barrier to entry considerably for anyone that may be interested in designing synthetic DNA for illegal purposes, such as toxin production outside of an approved research setting.
Any further comments about your project:
Besides the potential for creating DNA that may lead to the development of hazardous compounds and/or organisms, the ability to essentially make any sequence rapidly may make it more challenging to protect intellectual property. We addressed some of those concerns in a "white paper" that we posted on our iGEM 2014 website. This was a transcript of a round table discussion that we had, involving an outside professional in the field of software, to provide comparative insights.