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

  Our project is to modify S.pombe so that it can be used to detect diseases. S.pombe, fission yeast. It was originally isolated in 1893 by Lindner from East African millet beer. It was first developed as an experimental model in the 1950s to study genetics and cell cycle. Since this yeast is originated from millet beer, it has been around East African people for a long time. Proteins used in our pathway like STAT or FGF are components of our mammalian cells and have been widely used in various researches. Therefore, even if unplanned events occur, the possibility that our products harm or threat organisms, civilizations, and environments is nearly zero. Furthermore, since there is no need of it being exposed to people or environments to serve its purpose, there is no need to worry about any hazard..
  The worst case scenario would be that after it is accidentally exposed it may mutate into something that can be destructive. Such possibility 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 pathways. Therefore our BioBrick parts hardly raise a safety issue.

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

  Unfortunately, there is no organization in Korea that specializes in the safety issue of synthetic biology. When we contacted local bio-safety group, Korea Bio-safety Clearing House, they recommended us to talk to group in our institute that deals with safety of biology experiment in general. Therefore, we decided to follow 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 setting conditional factors. These conditional factors would be essential parts of yeast growth so that yeast can’t grow without them. In this way, we can grow experimented yeast only in designated area of laboratory. Also, during the experiment we can encourage people to put switches to implemented element so that we can turn it on/off new function that we give to our experimental tools. Lastly, we have to make or use programs that can simulate our experiment to reduce the risk of hazardous mutation of our experimental subjects. If we put these three precautionary acts to the experiment, we will be able to get experimental result in safer way.