Q. Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues?

  Our project is modifying S.pombe as a tool that can detect diseases. S.pombe, fission yeast, is a species of yeast. This was originally isolated in 1893 by Lindner from East African millet beer. It was first developed as an experimental model in the 1950s for studying genetics and cell cycle. Since this yeast is originated from millet beer, This yeast has been near East African people for a long time. And proteins used in our pathway like STAT or FGF are components of our mammalian cells and have been widely used for various research. So, even if unplanned events occur, the possibility that our product harm or threat other organisms, equipment and environment seems nearly zero. Furthermore, since there is no need for it to be exposed to people or the environment to do its function, it does not reperesent a hazard to people or the environment directly.
  The worst case scenario is that after it accidentally exposed to environment, by some biological superiority which could happen by modifying it can disturb ecosystem. The possibility that this scenario comes true is very low and the expected degree of hazard is comparatively low.

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

  Our BioBrick parts are FGFR and STAT. We add FGFR, STAT system into S.pombe. Without STAT, FGFR can’t generate signal in this system. And STAT is very well known element in many pathway that we are familiar of. For example, we can find STAT in most of interleukin related pathway. Therefore our BioBrick parts hardly raise safety issues.

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

  Unfortunately, there is no proper committee, or organization to treat and evaluate about experiment related with synthetic biology in Korea. So, when we required suitability about our project to local bio-safety group, Korea Bio-safety Clearing House, they answered that it is much better to talk with group in our university that deals with safety about biology experiment. So, we thought that it would be right to follow about experiment regulation of our university.

Q. 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?

  We can regulate e.coli or yeast growth system by putting conditional factors. These conditional factors can be made as essential part of yeast growth so that yeast can’t grow without it. In this way, we can only grow experimented yeast in laboratory. And during the experiment we can encourage people to put switches for implemented element so that we can turn on and off new function that we gave to our experimental tools. At last, we have to make or use programs that can simulate our experiment to reduce the risk of hazard mutation of our experimental subjects. If we put these three precaution element to the experiment, we will be able to get experimental result in safer way.