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From 2010.igem.org

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Safety

Bacterial microcompartments (BMCs) occur naturally in several bacteria, and are not associated with any toxicity issues. The goal of our project is to engineer BMCs to carry enzymatic pathways for biocatalysis. In future, this technology can be used in industrial fermentations for production of various compounds. Like any other technology, the overall safety of in vivo nanobioreactors will depend on desired end product. If enzymes targeted to the BMCs are such that the final product is toxic to human beings or other organisms, then we have a problem. If not, then our in vivo nanobioreactors should be safe for use. In fact, since BMCs are expected to prevent release of toxic reaction intermediates, our project may actually lead to safer manufacturing practices.

For our project, we have worked with non-pathogenic laboratory strains of E. coli (Biosafety level 1). We cloned ethanolamine utilization (Eut) genes from Salmonella LT2 genomic DNA, which was obtained from ATCC. None of us came in contact with live Salmonella cells. Execution of our idea involves working with non-pathogenic laboratory or industrial bacterial strains, under standard operating conditions. Therefore, we do not expect that our work will have an adverse effect on the safety of researchers or the public as a whole.

The University of Minnesota has an Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC), which oversees all research and teaching activities involving biological materials such as recombinant DNA, biologically produced toxins, and pathogens. [http://cflegacy.research.umn.edu/ibc/ cflegacy.research.umn.edu/ibc/ cflegacy] Guys, please check with Claudia tomorrow if we had IBC’s permission for our project. She’s out of town next week! All I can think of right now, is that our experiments were performed using Standard Operating Procedures which have been approved with the IBC.

All research conducted by the 2010 University of Minnesota iGEM team has been approved by the [http://cflegacy.research.umn.edu/ibc/ University of Minnesota Institutional Biosafety Committee].