Team:USTC/Safety
Safety
Creative and safe as well
Leaders
The biological materials involved in our project are microorganisms and modified plasmids.
For bacteria, this summer, our team worked mainly with nonpathogenic E.coli (strains: Top 10 & BL21) under BL1 standard. In addition, we employed yeasts under BL1 standard to complete our project. So during our experiment, we carefully follow the BL1 standard to do our experiments and use equipments properly.
To ensure biosafety in our wet lab and meet local and national safety standard in laboratry, we asked our team members to read The Regulations of Agriculture Genetically Modified Organisms Safety and The Regulations of Pathogenic microbial laboratory biosafety and offer biosafety training to every member in the wet-lab as well.
What's more, to protect us from hazardous chemicals and organisms, personal protective equipments, such as gloves, respirators and lab coats, were required during the experiment.
We had a lecture on bio-safety and synthetic biology for our team members in order to help us develop an all-around knowledge about biosafety. It also helps us prepare for performing experiments.
Biosafety is the prevention of large-scale loss of biological integrity, focusing both on ecology and human health. As future sciensts, the importance of knowing everything about biosafety can never be overemphasized.
We were told that prevention mechanisms include conduction of regular reviews of the biosafety in laboratory settings, as well as strict guidelines to follow. Biosafety is used to protect us from harmful incidents. We showed some infamous examples of biological incident caused by lab workers'incaution and help team members to realize the importance of keeping biosafety in mind.
After that, we set rules that we have to keep during our lab job and cases that may happen during our job, because we believe that a complete understanding of experimental risks associated with synthetic biology is helping to enforce the knowledge and effectiveness of biosafety.
As a matter of fact, we all know that biosafety is related to several fields including ecology, agriculture, medicine, synthetic biology, exobiology, and chemistry. So students who major in (or related to) subjects above are all invented to join the lecture.
In synthetic biology especially, scientists estimate that within the next few decades, organism design will be sophisticated enough to accomplish tasks such as creating biofuels and lowering the levels of harmful substances in the atmosphere. To be a full-marked scientist, during our research, we have to consider the use of biosafety mechanisms such as suicide genes and nutrient dependencies will ensure the organisms cannot survive outside of the lab setting in which they were originally created.
With the potential future creation of man-made unicellular organisms, some artists are beginning to consider the effect that these organisms will have on biomass. So after all of these, we watched a sciense fiction about future synthtic creatures together to end our lecture.
This year, none of the new parts will raise safety issues for further applications in the current knowledge.
Microorganism auxiliary to the device is genetically engineered E.coli and yeasts, carrying sfGFP1-10, sfGFP11, SUP35NM-sfGFP1-10 and SUP35-sfGFP11. Even all the parts have been proved no harm to the public usage, we still take genetic safety into consideration.
Microorganism will be conglutinated to the film and then encapsulated. Conveyance before applying can be ensured convenient and secure. Our device detects the sample in a box without the need of contact and contagion. The real device will be made in bacteriostatic plastic, ulteriorly lower the risk of genetic contamination.
Besides, strains concerned are laboratory strains. Even leaked to the environment, they are not competitive enough to survive and threaten the environment and public health. Moreover, our yeasts for appication are marked with auxotroph so that they could not survive in nature.
We are convinced that the prion used in our lab unlikely cause any safety problems. The Sup35 exists in yeast and there is not any evidence to prove that there is a route of transmission for the prion to infect human beings, or this prion could be pathogenic in humans. So far it has never been registered in the scientific literature. Generally speaking, if the Sup35 succeeded in infecting a different species, which means that if the prion went into the cells of the infected organisms, the infected ones would hardly show any of the symptoms or result in disease. This effect named “species barrier” and it has been shown by Cobb and Surewicz that as the two species have the little common amino acidic sequence, the transmission between them are prevented[1]. Additionally, some researchers have already observed that there truly exists a barrier between two species that are S. cerevisae and C. albicans, although both contain homologue Sup35 proteins[2]. The transmission of that prion is related to the amyloid fibrils of the protein Sup35. The N domain of that protein from both species mentioned above has a high Asparagine or Glutamine content, and there is also amyloid growth in several fungal prions[3]. But there is little chance for Sup35 to induce the protein in the other species to change its conformation. Comparing to the C. albicans, human beings are in less common with yeast that we applied in our experiments, so we reach the conclusion that our program will not cause any safety problems to the environment.
[1]. Chien, P., Weissman, J.S., DePace, A.H. (2004). Emerging principles of conformation-based prion inheritance. Annual Reviews in Biochemestry. 73:617–656.
[2]. Cobb, N.J., Surewicz, W. K. (2009). Prion diseases and their biochemical mechanisms. Biochemistry. 48: 2574–2585.
[3]. Wickner, R.B., Shewmaker, F., Kryndushkin, D., Edskes, H.K. (2008). Protein inheritance (prions) based on parallel in-register β-sheet amyloid structures. BioEssays. 30: 955-964.
