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Team:Berkeley/Human Practices
From 2010.igem.org
- Home
- Project
- Parts
- Self-Lysis
- Vesicle-Buster
- Payload
- [http://partsregistry.org/cgi/partsdb/pgroup.cgi?pgroup=iGEM2010&group=Berkeley Parts Submitted]
- Results
- Judging
- Clotho
- Human Practices
- Team Resources
- Who We Are
- Notebooks:
- [http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/Berk2010-Daniela Daniela's Notebook]
- [http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/Berk2010-Christoph Christoph's Notebook]
- [http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/Berk2010-Amy Amy's Notebook]
- [http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/Berk2010-Tahoura Tahoura's Notebook]
- [http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/Berk2010-Conor Conor's Notebook]
Human Practices: Rethinking Biosafety
Current Biosafety Standards
Biosafety is undoubtedly one of the highest priorities of any synthetic biology institution. When manipulating systems as complex as the cell, there is always high degree of uncertainty. Unexpected results in living constructs have the potential to be disastrous, especially when dealing with pathogenic organisms or virulence factors. The NIH and CDC have developed a standard of biosafety levels (BSL) to rate the risk factor associated with different biological agents and genetic parts. They are summarized here:
- BSL 1- Well characterized parts and organisms that are not consistently pathogenic to healthy adults.
- BSL 2- Associated with mild human diseases, but do not readily spread through aerosols
- BSL 3- Associated with deadly or severe human diseases that we have vaccines or treatments for.
- BSL 4- Associated with deadly, aerosol-spread diseases that have no known vaccine or treatment
The current system of rating synthetic biological devices simply chooses the highest rated part or gene within the device and rates the entire device based on that number. For example, we could not submit our Vesicle Lysis parts this year because they contained genes from the pathogen "Clostridium perfringens", making the entire device BSL2.
Shortcomings of the System
The CDC is wary of recombinant
