Team:Tokyo Tech/safety

Q&A

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 four questions:

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

Q、 Is there a local biosafety group, committee, or review board at your institution? A、 Biosafety committee of our organization accepted our aplications.

Q、 What does your local biosafety group think about your project? A、 They think our project is leagal.

Q、 Do any of the new BioBrick parts that you made this year raise any safety issues? A、 No. Our parts are safty level one. We used genes which are analysed in peer-reviewed papers.

Q、 If yes, did you document these issues in the Registry? A、 Just in case, we refereed papers for our new biobrick parts.

Public Safety

We made sure that our project itself wont cause any kind of danger toward the public. Even if the circuit we built work disorderly, it wont cause any kind of biohazard.

Researchers' safety

For conducting experiments safely, we made an agreement within our team as follows:

1.Time restriction

All of our experiments were held in the time zone of A.M5:00 to P.M22:00, for midnight experiments could be a major cause of accident. We planned our experiments to meet this rule and made sure all the experiments never to be held in distracted mind.

2.Outfits

In Bioengineering experiments, we always have to be aware of the fact that we're handling genetically modified organisms,and there's always danger of the outburst of genetically engineered organisms outside the laboratory if enough attention is paid by the researchers. We always sterilized our hands by alcohol before/after the experiment, and changed our shoes when getting in/out the laboratory. Of course, experimental-appropriate outfits were chosen in the whole period in iGEM.

3.Disposal of chemicals/samples

All the used-cultures were autoclaved in prior to disposal. Also danger chemicals(e.g. organic chemicals) were collected in tank and appropriately processed.