Difference between revisions of "Team:UNebraska-Lincoln/Integrated Practices 3"

Safety Cases and Synthetic Biology

Since the inception of the project, we aimed to provide a scientifically feasible and practically safe solution to managing the nitrogen cycle. One that can be applied to the natural environment. We designed and installed a novel kill-switch that leads to the death of our machine once the concentration of nitrate is reduced below the safety level. Over the summer, we met with scientists from local biotech companies and fellow iGEMers to discuss both the scientific and safety aspects our project design. Based on the feedback, we became more mindful of safety and began to integrate an interdisciplinary tool to our project. We developed safety cases, a method that is currently used to gauge the safety of critical software systems to simulate the end-results of releasing our engineered microorganisms into the environment.

These aspects of our project served the dual benefit of improving our design by forcing us to think critically about the mechanisms and environment of our project and allowing us to connect with and respond to the public in order to educate them and respond to their concerns.