Team:Nottingham/Safety

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Safety

Dry lab safety hazard: spilling coffee on your laptop!

Safety considerations for our team have been very different from previous years. COVID-19 has had a huge impact on how our team could work and presented many challenges. We were able to overcome those challenges through open discussions and careful considerations of laws and guidelines provided by the UK government and by iGEM – anything that could be applied to our activities. Our safety considerations focused on COVID-19 safety measures, which are covered in detail on this page. We also built safety mechanisms into our project, including a biocontainment strategy to ensure our genetically modified organism could not escape into the environment. Our biocontainment method is outlined below, but can be read in detail on the Design page.

COVID-19

By March 2020, COVID-19 had arrived in a big way in the UK. It was spreading unchecked and, due to high infection rates and struggling hospital capacity, the UK went into national lockdown on the 23rd of March 2020. Even before then, our team was already being proactive in responding to the pandemic. Interviews for potential team members took place during the week before lockdown, but our supervisors decided to conduct the interviews online, so as to avoid contact and potential transmission of COVID amongst the applicants and supervisors.
As the UK went into lockdown, we began our project. We held all our meetings online to comply with coronavirus-related restrictions and to ensure we did not spread it among the group. A few weeks later, we realised we would not have access to the lab during the summer and decided to work on a dry lab-based project. We adapted our project to this new situation, drawing up lists of protocols that we would have carried out in the lab and using mathematical modelling to guide our decisions.
Over the summer, the COVID-19 restrictions in the UK were reduced, and the team slowly started to return to Nottingham. Then, we were presented with the opportunity to compete in the Tough Mudder challenge to raise money for the Cure Parkinson’s Trust. To evaluate whether this was safe or not, we researched the precautions that the organisers were putting in place for the event this year. We found that the event was being run virtually, with each team having to run 5-mile laps in their local area, doing exercises in between each lap. This would take place over a period of 12 hours. In addition, teams were limited to a maximum of 6 people from different households. These precautions seemed reasonable to us, so we decided to participate and take advantage of this opportunity to raise a meaningful amount of money for the Cure Parkinson’s Trust. We had 5 team members attend, respecting the limit imposed by the organisers. We decided to use Alistair’s house as our start and finish points, as it was in the countryside and it was a large house. This allowed us to choose a route where we would not run past many people, reducing our COVID risk. We also ran on the paths whenever we were running by a road and only ran along roads lit by streetlamps. We wore bright white T-shirts to make us more visible when running along country footpaths in the dark.
In late September, a rise in the UK’s R number led to stricter restrictions imposed by the government. We wanted to wear matching team hoodies during the jamboree, so we contacted a store in Nottingham city centre to have them made. To avoid having each team member travel into the city centre in tier 2 restrictions, we arranged to have the hoodies delivered to each of our houses.
Overall, our COVID-19 response was robust and effective. We always worked together, encouraging open discussion about what the team was comfortable with, as well as keeping well up to date on the COVID restrictions throughout the project. So far, none of our team members have tested positive for COVID, which is a testament to the effectiveness of our precautions as well as the personal efforts each team member has made to stay safe.

Control Mechanism

During the design of our project, we wanted to take into account safety measures related to the generation of a genetically modified organism (even though the project was only theoretical and the organism would not actually be created). Our biotherapeutic would require the modification of the genome of C. sporogenes by introducing new sections of DNA - these would be essential for the production of DBHB at therapeutic levels. Since our treatment would involve the administration of spores of this genetically engineered strain to the patients, the subsequent release of the organism to the environment was a concern. Therefore, from the start of our project, we planned to include a mechanism to control and contain our strain.
The obligate anaerobe C. sporogenes should not survive outside of the gut unless it forms highly resistant spores, which already provides some form of containment. By blocking the formation of spores in the gut, we should be able to avoid the release of the strain to the environment. We developed a control mechanism that should make sporulation dependent on the addition of a specific inducer. Consequently, our strain would be able to form spores in our bioreactors (where the inducer would be added), but not in the gut. Our aim was to have no more than 1 in 1x108 cells escaping into the environment - ideally, none should escape at all! Find more information on the control subgroup section of the Design page.