This year, the Peking iGEM Team is trying to develop a framework of sequential logic circuits in cells. Here we are going to share our experience in safety control.

Safe Project Design

Choosing a non-pathogenic chassis
In our project, non-pathogenic strains of E. coli were the only chassis used to perform molecular cloning and protein expression.
Choosing parts that will be environmental friendly
Harmful parts are not allowed in our project. The parts in our project are mostly commonly used recombinases and expression control units (such as terminators and promoters widely used in research), so that none of our parts would raise any safety issues according to current professional knowledge.

Safe Lab Work

According to the requirements of iGEM policy, in our daily bench work we never performed any dangerous experiments or faced any unusual safety issues. Our bench work followed some basic regulations as follows:

1. Duplicating a key to the laboratory without permission is strictly prohibited.
2. Participants need to understand the experiment completely.
3. Wear rubber gloves during all experimenters.
4. Steps with any probability of contamination should be performed in a biosafety cabinet.
5. Fire, electric heaters, and microwave ovens should never be left unattended.
6. All liquid and solid waste containing living organisms must be autoclaved.
7. Sanitize the lab using UV-light every week.
8. The last person to leave the lab should make sure that water, electricity, gas, and air conditioners have been turned off, and doors and windows have been locked before leaving.

Safe Shipment

As mentioned above, our DNA parts are absolutely safe because they encode safe proteins such as Bxb1 gp35 and their combinations with promoters/terminators. The DNA parts are safely contained within PCR tubes as the Parts registry requires.

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