Team:DTU-Denmark/Safety
Choosing a non-pathonenic chassis
It was our PhD. supervisor Kyle who got the idea to expand the iGEM participation in Denmark and include a high school team of students in the age of 16-19. There have been a growing interest in the High school track around the world (see Fig 1) and Philip, from the last DTU team, Tenna and Jacob therefore set out to establish a high school team in the greater Copenhagen area to compete in iGEM; and so, the project ‘Copenhagen High School Symbiotes’, CHSS for short, was born.
Unusual experiments at drylab
When testing the fungal material, an unusual safety concern was that we had to be absolutely sure that the GMO material was completely dead, as to not spread any live spores outside of the laboratory. We did this by baking the product, and testing the viability of any baked spores. We found literature suggesting that the spores were killed at 70 ° celsius $^1$, which was confirmed by our experiments.
In addition to this we exposed our fungi to large amounts of gamma radiation (comparable to a dose rate received on Mars). These experiments were performed in a controlled environment at DTU Risø, where the sources were encapsulated in lead, and only raised after the testing room was evacuated. The walls of the testing room were lined with lead, and dosimeters were worn at all times to check the levels of background radiation.
There is really not much to it. We have to be sure to NOT stick our appendages (hands, fingers etc…) into the machine performing the compression tests. It moves very slowly, so it is in principle hard to have any accidents there.