Team:Michigan/Safety
Safety
With safe laboratory practices in mind, we designed Thermolyze as a bacterial kill switch that can help researchers prevent the ‘escape’ of their organisms.
All team members underwent the University of Michigan’s Department of Occupational Safety and Environmental Health safety training for basic wet lab work as well as specific training for safe autoclave usage, and reviewed our lab space and practices. They concluded that our research was conducted in a way that minimized risk.
Our project was also reviewed and approved by the University of Michigan’s Institutional Biosafety Committee consisting of research faculty.
We used E. coli as our chassis organism because it is widely used in synthetic biology and easy to work with. It is a Risk 1 type organism, which means it poses little to no threat to human safety. Ampicillin resistance was included as a selection factor during our experiments. We prevented the spread of this resistance with careful containment and sanitation.
Thermolyze is intended as a temperature-based kill switch. The parts may serve as a secondary safety measure in synthetic biology lab work. We cannot think of any practical applications Thermolyze outside of a controlled lab setting, and it should not be used to control synthetic organisms in the environment.
T4 holin, the main lytic component of Thermolyze, specifically targets bacterial cell membranes (Tran et al., 2005). The concentrations produced in this project poses little danger to eukaryotes. It still should be treated as a toxic biochemical, but it is less dangerous than a concentrated acid.
See more of of our safety concerns and thought process in our Silver Human Practices page.
