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From 2010.igem.org

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

Since our project doesn’t include producing of dangereous chemical products, or modification that could be pathogen, there is no evident safety issues, concerning public or the researcher himself, if we except the well-known risks of all molecular biology researches.
Of course, any bacterial modification imply the risk of genetic transduction in other bacteria, which consequences we cannot predict; that’s why we have designed the very efficient way of preventing contamination of the river by escaped bacteria (see Cell Death module)
Environmentally speaking, the carbonated molecules used by bacteria are obtained from wasted water, and residual carbone is found, at the end of the process, in the bacterial sludge, so the carbone balance is null. Even more, there is an free energy production, through the release of dihydogen, which could be used as an alternative to other pollutive and limited resources. We can then affirm our project is environmentally friendly, and doesn’t present evident environmental issues.

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

No, all of the BioBricks we sent or intended to send were made from DNA parts usually used in our host lab, with no particular safety issues.

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

Yes, there is a specific biosafety commitee for the ULB Institute of Molecular Biology and Medicine, which was our host lab. They have to approve any new project carried in the institute, including end of studies works, and thesis, which is routine, except if the project includes, for example, manipulation of pathogens organisms.
See the Bioethics part, section biosecurity for more detailed explanation about the standard protocol, in Belgium, to obtain the authorization to carry out an experimentation.

If yes, what does your local biosafety group think about your project?

Our project was part of the routine of the committee, since all the DNA parts we designed were already used, in different projects in our host lab. We didn’t have special presentations to do or forms to fill and obtained quite automatically the authorization to manipulate.

If no, which specific biosafety rules or guidelines do you have to consider in your country? Do you have any other ideas how to deal with safety issues that could be useful for future iGEM competitions? How could parts, devices and systems be made even safer through biosafety engineering?

Maybe should potentially pathogens or environmentally problematic parts be referenced, with an indice of danger calculated using a standard classification.
More drastically, for these devices presenting safety issues, we could impose the teams to encode it with a proposition of programmed cell death system, to avoid contamination, and they’ll have to prove the efficacy of that security system before the DNA is sent to the other teams.