Describe all the safety issues of your project.
Synthetic biology will need to be used safely and securely if local people are to solve local problems all around the world. The Safety and Security Committee is challenging teams to apply biological engineering approaches to manage risks associated with synthetic biology. Can you take the next step in incremental progress towards knowledge, understanding, and tools that will make the use of synthetic biology safer and more secure?
To compete for the Safety and Security award, please describe your work on this page and also fill out the description on the judging form.
Please see the 2023 Awards Page for more information.
Our team’s number one goal in the lab is always safety. We believe it is essential to prioritize the health of our team, our university community, and the environment. This year, and every year, we have incorporated safety into our project design and our lab work.
The GSU-SWJTU iGEM team works in a Biosafety Level 1 (BSL-1) laboratory. Although BSL-1 laboratories contain only low-risk microorganisms, our team follows rigorous safety standards. Lab access is strictly limited through card access to members of the iGEM team and other trained university researchers. Before working in the lab, all team members received safety training, including security awareness, right-to-know, hazardous waste, lab safety, and autoclave training. In the lab, food and drink are forbidden (pizza parties strictly kept in the hallway), and personal protective equipment (PPE) is worn at all times, including gloves, lab coats, and goggles as necessary. Before exiting the lab, all workspaces are sterilized with ethanol, and students decontaminate via handwashing.
Safety is at the heart of our project design. For our project, we intentionally selected two well-studied and non-pathogenic chasses, E. coli and C. reinhardtii. We only use E. coli strains that are not harmful to humans. When selecting the algae species to use in our project, we selected C. reinhardtii because it is very well studied and known to be non-harmful. All the genetic parts we’ve designed are non-harmful to humans, animals, or plants.
With biosafety and security at the forefront of our minds, our team set out to develop an induced lethality system for our co-culture. The goal of this system is to control E. coli and C. reinhardtii, ensuring that they cannot survive in any environments outside of the laboratory.