For iGEM 2010 teams are asked to detail how they approached any issues of biological safety associated with their projects. Specifically, teams should consider the following questions:

      1. Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of: researcher safety, public safety, or environmental safety?

      2. Do any of the new BioBrick parts (or devices) that you made this year raise any safety issues? If yes, did you document these issues in the Registry? how did you manage to handle the safety issue? How could other teams learn from your experience?

      3. Is there a local biosafety group, committee, or review board at your institution? If yes, what does your local biosafety group think about your project? If no, which specific biosafety rules or guidelines do you have to consider in your country?

      4. Do you have any other ideas how to deal with safety issues that could be useful for future iGEM competitions? How could parts, devices and systems be made even safer through biosafety engineering?

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    In our university, National Chiao Tung University (NCTU), the Environmental and Safety Center (ESC) is strictly responsible for Safety of all labs in the school. What we can do in our project should follow the rules they permit, and they manage all instruments and chemicals, especially for dangerous and toxic ones, in all labs. The ESC is to be informed on the basis of our project and on what we are doing and plan to do. Therefore, the ESC has permitted our project at first.

    In addition, we do our wetlab activities in Common Instrument Rooms where are in charge of Biomedical Engineering Lab of Dr. Chih-Sheng Lin and Applied Microbiology & Biochemistry Lab of Dr. Ching-Ping Tseng. They would check whether the rules are followed or not everyday, and every time someone starts to work in these rooms, he or she should take down his or her student numbers in a log. Besides, when someone uses a common instrument, he or she should record the purpose for the instrument.

    Briefly, under these requirements, the progress for our project would not raise any possible safety issues.

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    As above we mentioned, we did our work under the control, so in fact, we did not get hurt during working. Our work also is harmless to the public and the environment. Since after we had finished our progress for a day or a step, we always dealt with the contaminated trash carefully. This is the most important in our work.

    We only worked with non-hazardous, non-infectious, commonly used and accepted bacteria strains. All work was conducted in a biosafety level S1 laboratory. Rules of best microbiological practices were applied.Almost Biobricks we used are from MIT, and only somethings new we made and modified from previous Biobricks in 2009 iGEM works ourselves. Actually, these new and old Biobricks are very safe.

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