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From 2010.igem.org

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Human Practices: Rethinking Biosafety

Current Biosafety Standards

Biosafety is undoubtedly one of the highest priorities of any synthetic biology institution. When manipulating systems as complex as the cell, there is always high degree of uncertainty. Unexpected results in living constructs have the potential to be disastrous, especially when dealing with pathogenic organisms or virulence factors. The NIH and CDC have developed a standard of biosafety levels (BSL) to rate the risk factor associated with different biological agents and genetic parts. They are summarized here:

• BSL 1- Well characterized parts and organisms that are not consistently pathogenic to healthy adults.
• BSL 2- Associated with mild human diseases, but do not readily spread through aerosols
• BSL 3- Associated with deadly or severe human diseases that we have vaccines or treatments for.
• BSL 4- Associated with deadly, aerosol-spread diseases that have no known vaccine or treatment

The current system of rating synthetic biological devices simply chooses the highest rated part within the device and cr

Background

The human practice component of our project involved determining the bio-safety level of composite parts.