Biosafety

NCKU-iGEM team is concerned with biosafety and biosecurity in every aspect of our project. We realize one major responsibility of iGEMers is to show the public that the project as well as synthetic will not do harm to the environment and the society. We make checks on every safety detail including materials, lab, designed device, and every team member.

1. Material and project safety? OF COURSE

Chassis organism

We chose E. coli as our chassis organism. Three lab strains were selected: “DH5 alpha”, “BL21(DE3)”, “W3110”, and ”W3110 (L5T7)”. These lab strains are reported to be not pathogenic to human. We construct our design with these strains in authorized lab (biosafety level 1 lab) only.

New parts construction

We chose E. coli as our chassis organism. Three lab strains were selected: “DH5 alpha”, “BL21(DE3)”, “W3110”, and ”W3110 (L5T7)”. These lab strains are reported to be not pathogenic to human. We construct our design with these strains in authorized lab (biosafety level 1 lab) only.

2. Establishment of the iGEM lab

This is the third year since the establishment of iGEM NCKU-Tainan team. We have raised the awareness of synthetic biology in our campus. Mrs. Jenny Su and the College of Engineering decided to give us a headquarter which contains a meeting room and a lab. To meet the lab standard of CDC (Center for Disease Control), we made contact with Mrs. Liu Yee Fen, the contact person of Center for Occupational safety and Health and Environmental Protection, which is the authorized unit in our campus responsible for lab safety and security. With the assistance of our instructor Dr. Ng, we successfully certify our lab to BSL1 saftey level one lab. Mrs. Liu gave us some lab security instructions and advice. She also suggested that each of our members should attend the biosafety lab training program.

Expect the lab in iGEM headquarter, wet team has constructed out design in various labs whose supervisors are Dr. I-Son Ng, Dr. I-Hsiu Huang, Dr. Han-Ching Wang, and Dr. Hashimoto Masayuki. The labs mentioned above are all certified biosafety level one.

3. Safety training for every teammate

It is a must for anyone to pass the authorized training section before conducting any experiments in lab. Since our applied design must be tested with constructed bacteria, each of our team members will have chances to approach the lab. We decided that whole team should be certified to do the experiments in biosafety level one lab. Team members from biotechnology have already passed the training session, and the rest of team members have passed the training online course. We believe that learning safety and security knowledge lower the risk when we conducted experiments inside biolab.

4. A step toward low carbon society, a leap against wasting and pollution

Safety Design

The goal of our project is to fix CO2 emitted from industries by using modified E.coli and produce high value compound. At the same time, we aware of the safety concerns of introducing synthetic organisms into the environment. We designed a bioreactor that ensures the engineered E.coli act as a closed system and separated from the environment. Each inlet and outlet of the bioreactor is equipped with filter too. Furthermore, uv or heat(尚未完成)

Biosafety Test

The goal of our project is to fix CO2 emitted from industries by using modified E.coli and produce high value compound. At the same time, we aware of the safety concerns of introducing synthetic organisms into the environment. We designed a bioreactor that ensures the engineered E.coli act as a closed system and separated from the environment. Each inlet and outlet of the bioreactor is equipped with filter too which prevents the outflow of the engineered bacteria. We tested the safety of our device by incubating bacteria inside. We collected the waste sample from the filter and apply it on to the agar plate. Comparing with the control group that does not passed the filter, we found out that the filter can effectively isolate the bacteria inside our device.

In our applied design, we planned to extract protein and bioproduct from E. coli . The waste should be then collected and stertilized. We planned to combine the waste heat recovery system in the factory to stertilize the waste medium . One of the main goal of our applied design, to turn waste to valuable resource, is fulfilled in this biosafety design.