Team:Nanjing-China/Collaborations
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Biosafety is the prevention of large-scale loss of biological integrity, focusing both on ecology and human health. These prevention mechanisms include conduction of regular reviews of the biosafety in laboratory settings, as well as strict guidelines to follow. Biosafety is used to protect us from harmful incidents. High security facilities are necessary when working with Synthetic Biology as there are possibilities of bioterrorism acts or release of harmful chemicals and or organisms into the environment. A complete understanding of experimental risks associated with synthetic biology is helping to enforce the knowledge and effectiveness of biosafety.
With the potential future creation of man-made unicellular organisms, some are beginning to consider the effect that these organisms will have on biomass already present. Scientists estimate that within the next few decades, organism design will be sophisticated enough to accomplish tasks such as creating biofuels and lowering the levels of harmful substances in the atmosphere. Scientist that favor the development of synthetic biology claim that the use of biosafety mechanisms such as suicide genes and nutrient dependencies will ensure the organisms cannot survive outside of the lab setting in which they were originally created. Organizations like the ETC Group argue that regulations should control the creation of organisms that could potentially harm existing life. They also argue that the development of these organisms will simply shift the consumption of petroleum to the utilization of biomass in order to create energy. These organisms can harm existing life by affecting the prey/predator food chain, reproduction between species, as well as competition against other species (species at risk, or act as an invasive species). Synthetic vaccines are now being produced in the lab. These have caused a lot of excitement in the pharmaceutical industry as they will be cheaper to produce, allow quicker production, as well enhance the knowledge of virology and immunology.
Collaborations
Sharing and collaboration are core values of iGEM. We encourage you to reach out and work with other teams on difficult problems that you can more easily solve together.
Which other teams can we work with?
You can work with any other team in the competition, including software, hardware, high school and other tracks. You can also work with non-iGEM research groups, but they do not count towards the iGEM team collaboration gold medal criterion.
In order to meet the gold medal criteria on helping another team, you must complete this page and detail the nature of your collaboration with another iGEM team.
Here are some suggestions for projects you could work on with other teams:
- Improve the function of another team's BioBrick Part or Device
- Characterize another team's part
- Debug a construct
- Model or simulating another team's system
- Test another team's software
- Help build and test another team's hardware project
- Mentor a high-school team