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Team:Sheffield/Safety
From 2010.igem.org
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| The Sheffield iGEM 2010 project came under a much larger EPSRC pathogen detection and water industry project. This dealt with approval from the University safety committee and also included many risk assessments and detailed the use of GM organisms. The strains of E.coli used were none pathogenic and designed to not survive well outside of the laboratory environment to reduce risk to both researcher and to the public/environment. To supplement researcher safety, every team member underwent safety and waste disposal training before performing any experiments in the lab and the team was supervised throughout the project by more experienced research scientists. None of the biobricks designed by the team had any safety implications and the project was designed as such to avoid toxins from Vibrio cholera . Some considerations were given to the final iColi product, and it was decided that this would have to be kept seperate to the public drinking supply and well contained. It was also suggested that it might be beneficial to include some form of suicide plasmid within the final product to reduce any risk from escape. Safety for iGEM projects is very much project specific at the moment and in the limited timescale teams have it is unlikely that too many teams pay that much attention to safety concerns. In fact this was found in our interviews with other iGEM teams. If iGEM want to encourage work on the safety aspect of synthetic biology, maybe collaborative work in the area could be encouraged. |
