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Safety

While synthetic biology has huge promise for many diverse applications, there is the concern that because the materials we are manipulating and building with are the key components of life that we could create a potentially very dangerous or uncontrollable organism. We believe that our project does not constitute a significant safety risk to researchers, the public, or the ecosystem.

Our experiments fall under Section III-F-6, “Exempt Experiments,” of the NIH Guidelines for Research Involving Recombinant DNA Molecules by virtue of being in a Saccharomyces chassis (see Appendix C-III of the NIH Guidelines). The NIH Guidelines suggest Biosafety Level 1 (BSL 1) containment, and our procedures were conducted at BSL 1. “Typical” yeast is commonly used in both brewing and baking and are not typically dangerous. Even yeast infections, which are rare, are not very dangerous--albeit harder to eliminate, as both human cells and yeast cells are eukaryotic. Even so, we followed sterile procedure in our laboratory work to prevent our yeast from escaping. This included the use personal protection (gloves and lab coats), careful disposal of waste (autoclaving containers and use of properly marked biohazard bins) and thorough disinfection of surfaces (using ethanol).

Our yeast would not have additional genes that could produce toxins and will not produce any potential harmful agents(besides ethanol which people already knowingly and willingly ingest). As an added safety measure our yeast lacked functional genes for seven essential amino acids, ensuring their limiting their growth to highly supplemented growth media. Furthermore, the genes we added are extremely unlikely to provide a selective advantage to our engineered yeast in the wild, since the functionality they provide--fluorescence in response to voltage or calcium shock--is useless in their niche. In fact, the genes that were knocked out to enhance the function of our parts reduced the cells’ ability to adapt to environmental stress. Thus, we believe that our project is neither high risk nor high hazard.

There are many guidelines to regulate the safe utilization of recombinant DNA on organizational, local, state and national level. From the Hopkins medical school Biosafety Department to keep track of the recombinant DNA being used in the laboratories to the NIH guidelines, there are many safeguards in place to prevent unintentional (or intentional) damage to people or the environment.