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From 2010.igem.org

• Home
• Project
  • About The Toolkit
  • Oursystem
  • Producing The Antigen
  • Future Applications
  • Safety
• Toolkit
• Why Pichia
  • Pichia Vs Saccharomyces
  • Easy and Inexpensive to Culture
  • High production of foreign Protein while low levels of endogenous protein
  • Pichia pastoris versus Esherichia coli
• Protocols
  • Preparation Of Electrocompetent Cells
  • Preparation of Heat Shock Competent Cells
  • Transformation Using Electroporation
  • Transformation Using Heat Shock
• The Team
• Notebook

Safety

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

Future applications of the products designed with the Pichia pastoris system may potentially raise safety issues. This is because we have designed an influenza A virus antigen, that may be possibly used in a vaccine. An application such as this would undoubtedly raise safety concerns within the health community. Widespread administration of a vaccine would require clinical studies and regulatory measures beyond the scope intended for iGEM before wide spread administration.

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

• Did you document these issues in the Registry?

• How did you manage to handle the safety issue?

• How could other teams learn from your experience?

Activities involved with the development of BioBrick parts did not pose any safety issues to the 2010 Georgia State iGEM team. Therefore, no specific documentation has been made in the Registry. We have created one part in the dry lab that will require safety attention once further development has begun. Working with a synthesized influenza A virus antigen is accompanied with an implied potential risk. However, with out the virulent factors supplied by other components of the virus, this concern is not a realistic health threat. When this part enters the wet lab, the issue will be addressed to inform future potential users.

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

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

• If no, which specific biosafety rules or guidelines do you have to consider in your country?

Georgia State University has an Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC) (http://www.gsu.edu/research/ibc_committee_information.html). Throughout the course of work the team made sure all biosafety measures were enforced and followed. We were granted permission to conduct our work in a biosafety level two lab.

4. 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?

For future applications iGEM can implement its own safety quiz to each team across the globe. This can not only help emphasize safety issues, but also provide a standardized measure of safety to all teams. Parts, devices, and systems can also be made safer by applying a specific set of regulations by the Registry of Standard Biological parts. This can allow dissemination of those parts that are deemed unsafe.