Team:Pasteur Paris/Safety

A treatment more dangerous than the disease it treats ?

For this sentence not to become a reality for our project, we thought long and hard about biosafety. We chose to use Escherichia coli as a chassis because it is a Biosafety Level 1 organism and is very commonly used as a model in biology. We also used Saccharomyces Cerevisiae, another Biosafety Level 1 organism during our experiments.
As mentioned in the final safety form submitted in August 28, 2015, we worked in a Biosafety Level 1 lab and we took all the required precautions.

We also thought about what we could do to reduce contamination risks if our projet would become real.
One application of our project is to use our bacteria in small to medium enclosed industrial plants. The most efficient location would be either near water or in the ocean, where the microparticles are the most present. The plant would function as follows : the water containing micro- and macro-particles of plastic enters the plant and is put in a first container where the bacteria are located. The plastic is digested and the fluid moves on to the second compartment after filtration. In this compartment, Erythromycin A will be extracted. In normal conditions people would not be directly exposed to the bacteria.

We also thought of the possibility of using our bacteria before the plastic ends up in the ecosystem, at recycling facilities. Here, the bacteria would be in direct contact with solid plastic.

If our project were fully developed into a PlastiCure factory, we would have to be very careful that the modified strain of E.coli does not leave the plant and ends up in the ecosystem. This would be the main issue with our project. In order to reduce the risk of leaks into the ecosystem, we would implement a filtration system. The plant would have to be perfectly sealed. At the French Meet-up in Bordeaux, the Paris_Saclay team advised us to use a compartment with two filters to be safer and to reduce the risk of contamination.
We also plan to have a kill switch using an inducible promoter, so that the promoter will not function outside of our factory.

PlastiCure is a biological system designed to harbor 2 modules: degradation and synthesis. We imagined creating interchangeable versions of each module. This would enable us to degrade a different plastic and still synthesize Erythromycin A, or to degrade PET but synthesize a different molecule. PlastiCure has been thought in a modular fashion in order to produce a broad diversity of products, as an incentive to the industry to promote plastic waste recovery.

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