In our project we want to establish a new production platform for biofuel production based on ‘artificial endosymbiosis’. We choose two of the most used and well established model organisms in genetic engineering: Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Escherichia coli. By following and extending the guidelines for responsible and safe research, we are able to ensure minimal risks to experimentator and environment. Here, you can find all important safety aspects we followed through the course of this summer. Additionally, we focused a whole side project on safety - we created a complete database of all kill switches ever designed within the iGEM competition and were able to model four of them in detail.

Before starting our lab work, all students received a detailed safety instruction by covering all important aspects of working safely. This instruction was held by the safety officer of the Max Planck Institute for terrestrial microbiology Prof. Dr. Brandis-Heep, as well as Volker Vincon. A lab specific safety instruction was also given by our instructors. This covered for example:

Additionally, each student received an in depth training in every facility and for every instrument we had to work in or with (e.g. confocal microscope, FACS, HPLC) and was supervised during their measurements.

Since our project is meant to work as an industrial scale production, we wanted to keep safety issues as minimal as possible. Especially concerning our ‘endosymbiosis’ approach, we rejected several ideas for safety reasons. In the beginning of our project we wanted to use invasin and listeriolysin as an invasion method for our symbionts - this mechanism originates from Yersinia pestis and Yersinia tuberculosis and is part of their virulence factors, which makes them BSL3 and BSL2 organisms, respectively. Therefore, we choose a different and passive approach, a polyethylene glycol (PEG)-mediated fusion of vesicle enclosed microorganisms with yeast spheroplasts, which does not involve any pathogenic factors and therefore is harmless for humans and environment. During the lab work only BSL1 organisms have been handled, such as different strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Schizosaccharomyces pombe and Escherichia coli.

Before starting our lab work, all students received a detailed safety instruction by covering all important aspects of working safely. This instruction was held by the safety officer of the Max Planck Institute for terrestrial microbiology Prof. Dr. Brandis-Heep, as well as Volker Vincon. A lab specific safety instruction was also given by our instructors. This covered for example:

Before starting our lab work, all students received a detailed safety instruction by covering all important aspects of working safely. This instruction was held by the safety officer of the Max Planck Institute for terrestrial microbiology Prof. Dr. Brandis-Heep, as well as Volker Vincon. A lab specific safety instruction was also given by our instructors. This covered for example: