Safety
Lab safety
The biosafety at our institution is overseen by Hannover Medical School. Regular training is provided by the biosafety officers. Additionally, each lab has a responsible biosafety officer. The projects supervisors also closely supervised the working steps and each team member was provided with an additional on-site and hands-on safety training. This safety training included important information ranging from lab rules, such as wearing proper personal protective equipment required while handling organisms of different biosafety levels (BSL) and chemicals, to the emergency procedures etc. All supervisors have worked in BSL1 for more than 10 years and for more than four years in BSL2. Additionally, some of the team members have been working in the supervisors’ lab before IGEM for more than 2 years.
Laboratory use
The cloning work is performed in BSL1 and all cell culture work is performed in biosafety cabinets in BSL2 labs as these are the only labs available for cell culture. Our work is temporally strictly separated from any BSL2 work performed in these labs by other colleagues though.
Organisms and Parts
All the organisms and parts we use in our project are classified as S1 according to the German law on genetic engineering. They do not pose any risk to us, our colleagues, the community or the environment and are all on the White List that iGEM provided. No organism or part obtained is from outside the lab and none of these will be released after the project. All waste is inactivated via autoclaving.
Chemicals
For DNA gel staining Midori Green Advance is used, which is considered non-carcinogenic and less mutagenic than other gel staining dyes. Some of the applied chemicals are considered toxic (lipopolysaccharides). These were handled under a fume hood using appropriate personal protective equipment.
Further project related safety measures
If our project is fully developed, it is meant to represent a cell-based sensor of inflammatory toxins for early detection of biofilm development on implants. Therefore, encapsulated sensor cells would be associated with the implant in the human body and detection of biofilm formation would be possible by MRI (detection of enhanced expression of MagA) and by testing urin/blood for presence of Gaussia luciferase.
In term of ethics and risks, the use of genetically engineered organisms (in all fields including medical application) is still controversially discussed and not well-accepted by society yet. When associating our sensor with implants in humans and using as detector for biofilms, we would need to ensure that the sensor is working with high sensitivity and sensibility so that false positive and false negative diagnostic results can be minimized. The implanted sensor cells should also not entail the ability to proliferate and migrate into the human body to avoid patient risk. Additionally, a possible "deactivation" of the sensor cells, for example, via induced apoptosis over an inducible suicide gene would minimize the risk. Clinical risks, such as rejection of the sensor cells would also need to be taken into account. Further details on these issues are presented in the proposed implementation.