Overview
In 2017, Lanzhou iGEM Team aims to develop a nontoxic, eco-friendly and without resistance problem Bio-pesticides through synthetic biology. Here is our safety control.
Safe Project Design
1. Through carefuly thought, we decided to use dsRNA directly in verifying macro-experiments rather than bacterium with a suicide system.
Take the future application into consideration, Genetically modified crops are currently the best approach once a plant can express the dsRNA in the appropriate tissue at the proper dose. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that all crops will be replaced by dsRNA transgenic plants. Thus, a topical, non-transgenic RNAi approach maybe more practical because it does not genetically alter the crops, which can be developed more rapidly to meet industry needs and can be completed in a shorter amount time.
For further safety, as a kind of soil pollutant, even though engineered E.coli owns a perfect suicide system, the efficiency couldn’t up to 100 %. And bacterium will easily undergo horizontal gene transfer, which will increase RNAi off-target possibility towards non-target organisms. In contrast, dsRNA is much safer, which will gradually degrade within two months under the normal circumstance.
2. Steer clear of the potential RNAi off-target risk as much as possible
Safe Measures
In order to ensure the safety of the project, our team paid great attention to requirements of iGEM policy and we never performed any dangerous experiments in daily bench work or faced any unusual safety issues. The bench work followed some basic regulations as below:
- Everyone must wear lab coat, rubber gloves, trousers and shoes before entering the laboratory.
- All involved participants needed to understand the experiment completely, make sure team members can complete the experiment independently.
- Food was not allowed to appear in the lab.
- Any steps involving potential release of live microorganisms were performed in a bio-safety cabinet.
- All liquid and solid waste potentially containing living organism was sterilized.
Safe Shipment
Our DNA parts submitted are all absolutely safe because they encode non-hazardous proteins such as pectinase, celluse, and functional nucleus acids. The DNA parts were safely confined within PCR tubes as the Parts Registry requires.
