Team:ULaval/Safety

ULAVAL BAR Template

Safety

Since our project revolves around food and aspires to be an application in the maple syrup industry, it was designed to limit the risk for the experimenters and the environment. Currently, the concept is made to achieve the efficient expression of dextranase in Escherichia coli as chassis rather than the production of a food-grade product. Future steps of the project will involve modifying our procedures to make sure our purified enzyme is safe for consumption.

Even though 2 of the 3 dextranases we will be working on come from organisms belonging to the risk group of category 1 or 2, we will not use Streptococcus mutans nor Aureobasidium subglaciale per se, rather their respective sequences. Those sequences will be recombined into pET28a expression vectors. Since we will use E. coli DE3 as chassis for the expression of the many dextranases, there is no pathogenic risk for the experimenters.

However, among the analysis that will be performed, ethidium bromide will be used. Ethidium bromide is known to be a mutagenic and carcinogenic chemical. To ensure safety to the experimenters, an adequate training will be given to the members, thus limiting the risk.

The use of pET28a vector which includes a Kanamycin resistance gene as a selection parameter, could represent a risk for the environment. In fact, if our strain of E. coli DE3 transformed with the recombinant plasmid was to be released in the environment, it could propagate the resistance to Kanamycin. Therefore, this would contribute to the phenomenon of acquired antibiotics resistance. Hence, rigorous waste management to prevent the bacteria from contaminating the environment will be applied during the 2021 edition of the iGEM competition.

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Due to the current pandemic caused by the COVID-19, we could not access our lab in any way. Therefore, only dry lab analyses were done and our weekly meetings were essentially online since the start of the outbreak in Canada, declared in March 2020. We have done physical meetings twice since the outbreak in Canada. Everything was done in accordance with the rules issued by the Government of Canada (Government of Canada, 2020) and Université Laval (Université Laval, 2020) to limit the propagation of COVID-19.

From the above, our project would and could be held exclusively in level 1 containment lab.