Team:Purdue/Safety

• INTRODUCTION
• BACKGROUND
  • The Problem
  • Organisms
  • Enzymes
• PROJECT
  • Description
  • Project Development
  • Our Solution
• PARTS
  • Team Parts
  • Basic Parts
  • Composite Parts
  • Part Collection
  • Parts Used
  • Parts Submitted
• NOTEBOOK
• ATTRIBUTIONS
• OUR PROCESS
• HUMAN PRACTICES
• SAFETY
• MODELING

Safety in iGEM

In the Lab

We worked with E. coli and yeast. The risk of infection working with yeast is minimal, but we followed safety level one procedures, sterile technique, and always wore lab coats and rubber gloves.

In the World

Our genetically modified yeast could escape into the surroundings via an unknown spill. Although we have planned for and constructed a "killswitch" mechanism consisting of a kill sequence downstream of a oxygen repressible promoter sequence (which may control the genetically modified organism from propagating downstream into an anaerobic bioreactor), there is no way to know if our organism leaks out of the system. Since the long-term operation and properties of our genetically modified organism are not fully understood, a spill of our organism may cause a variety of unknown effects on the environment, from infection to horizontal gene transfer and mutations. To reduce these risks, we may look into implementing engineered auxotrophy into our organism so that it would only be able to survive in the presence of a cheap material, reducing the chance that it will survive in an environment outside its intended vessel in the case of a spill. In addition, other strains of yeast with inherent oxygen/other compound dependence may be used to design a more robust containment system. However, we will have to work around optimization of safety and utility/economy as these steps may inhibit the purpose of our organism either by lowering it's activity or requiring large quantities of compounds to fulfill auxotrophic requirements.