Biosafety

1. Would any of your project ideas raise safety issue in terms of research safety, public saftety, or environmental safety?

No issues of researcher safety, public safety or environmental safety were raised during Debrecen's iGEM 2010 project.

2. Do any of the new BioBrick parts (or devices) that you made this year raise any safety issues?

We only worked with non-hazardous, non-infectious, commonly used and accepted bacteria strain (DH5α) and mammalian cancer cell lines (COS-1). When working with toxic chemicals (e.g. ethidiumbromide or estrogen), nitrile gloves, and white coats were worn. All of the work was conducted in a biosafety level S1 laboratory. Rules of the best microbiological practices were applied. All material handled or distributed are non-hazardous and non-infectious. It agrees with all safety standards requested biosafety level 1, therfore the project get a full supports for the work done by the iGEM team.

We developed synthetic LBD's for use in mammalian cells in fusion parts. These parts are completely harmless, no matter what organism they are transformed / transfected into.

3. Is there a local biosafety group, committee, or review board at your institution?

There is a project leader for biological safety issues for the group that advised us. There is also a biosafety supervisor who supervises biological safety university-wide.

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