Safety
Lab Safety
• Lab Safety Training
Before our team members were allowed to enter the lab, we must all take the lab safety training. The training includes how to use the machine in our lab properly, how to react correctly if there was an emergency and how to protect ourselves during the experiments.
• Safety during the experiments
When we are doing the experiments, we can guarantee that:
- Wearing lab-grown
- Wearing lab gloves
- Using the experimental machine properly
- Deal with the waste in a proper manner
• Safety tutor
We have a safety tutor in our lab. He taught us how to do the experiment safely, and he will watch us to make sure that we all behave in the right way. When we do something that is unsafe, he will point out and make sure that we won’t do it again.
Biobrick Safety
The Biobrick parts we built have no safety issue according to our knowledge.
Project Related Material Safety
① Avermectins
• Environmental Safety
- Can be decomposed easily by microorganism in soil
- Sensitive to sun light
- High selectivity: only have effects on a few certain pests including termites and cotton aphid
- Complete safe to large mammals under recommended concentrations
• Application Safety
- Complete safe to users under recommended concentration
- Already existed mature industrial production system
- Already have more than 3000 registered avermetin-related products in China, passing the security check of AQSIQ (State General Administration of the People’s Republic of China for Quality Supervision and Inspection and Quarantine)
② Toxic Proteins
Experimental Safety
During the experiment, we worry that our gene modified bacterium would get out of the lab, thus we figured out several ways to make our bacterium safer.
① Inducible Promoter
In our plan, we shall build four constructs to express toxin proteins that helps killing termites. In case that our bacterium get outside and leak the toxic protein into the environment, we use an inducible promoter in our constructs. Only when there is arabinose in the medium, can the promoter work as usual. There is no arabinose outside the lab, so our bacterium won’t leak the toxic protein.
② Kill Switch
With regard to this CidA-LrgA system and the BNU iGEM 2014 kill switch design6, we designed our own kill switch as the figure 3 shows. When cultured with our IPTG-added medium, these bacteria would live as usual to function as a mini-factory to amplify plasmids or to produce plasmids for our use, whereas they would die due to the cell membrane lysis and release of genomic DNA. Moreover, we put the lrgA gene under the control of a weak and constitutive promoter J23116 to in case of the leaky expression of the CidA to prevent cell lysis.
Device Safety & Social Safety
In our project, we designed a device aiming at better controlling and killng termites. This device is absolutely not allowed to be used outdoors, but is designed to be used in the house instead. After we designed the device, we are afraid that people might use it in a wrong way after they bought it. In order to avoid people wrongly operating our device, we also design an instruction of our device as below.
We plan to sell our device with the instruction attached to it, and we believe that our device would be safer with our well-designed instruction.
Furthermore, we considered the social safety of our whole project. According to the chart we show below, we considered every aspect to confirm that our project are safe under given conditions..
