Safety

Safe Project Design

We made our best effort to ensure our project design was as safe as possible:

1. Our chassis, C. reinhardtii, is non-toxic and non-pathogenic.
2. None of our parts produce toxic substabces not found commonly in nature.
3. We considered that it would be safer to reduce the level of cyanobacteria via depleting the nutrient levels, rather than trying to engineer a chemical or organism to eliminate them.
4. Local wastewater treatment plants UV irradiate effluent before releasing it into the lake, which would assist in preventing the escape of live C. reinhardtii.
5. We would need to perform our own research on kill switches or auxotrophic strains for rare amino acids to determine which would be most efficient, environmentally friendly, and fiscally capable. One viable method could be using the auxotrophic strain for SPD1, which requires supplemental spermidine for survival (Freudenberg et al., 2022, Cells).

Safe Lab Work

Almost all of our work was done in lab strains of E. coli, and in normal BSL1 Lab conditions. Gloves and ethanol sterilization were used consistently to prevent contamination. Most of the safety concerns were avoided completely by simply not working with any dangerous chemicals or organisms. In the few instances where dangerous chemicals were used (ethidium bromide for gels), gloves and isolated lab materials were used.