Safety
staying safe while having fun
Safety Precautions
With safe laboratory practices in mind, we designed our biosensor that could help with the detection of spoilage in milk.
All team members underwent the University of Michigan’s Department of Occupational Safety and Environmental Health safety training for basic wet lab work as well as specific training for safe autoclave usage, and reviewed our lab space and practices. They concluded that our research was conducted in a way that minimized risk.
We used E.coli as our chassis organism because it is widely used in synthetic biology and easy to work with. It is a Risk 1 type organism, which means it poses little to no threat to human safety. Ampicillin resistance was included as a selection factor during our experiments. We prevented the spread of this resistance with careful containment and sanitation.
We used Chromobacterium violaceum and its mutant, CV026, for one of our characterization assay to quantify AHL. C. violaceum is a gram-negative bacterium that is capable of producing violacein, a purple pigment. Strain CV026 is a violacein-negative, mini-Tn5 mutant of C. violaceum, which is capable of expressing the purple pigment in the presence of AHL. C. violaceum and its mutant CV026 is a Risk 2 type organism. They rarely cause infections, but when it does it may cause skin lesions, liver and lung abscess, and fatal septicemia in serious cases. However, infections can be successfully treated with antibiotics. All team members were informed of the potential hazards associated with CV026. Safety precautions were employed when handling CV026. Kanamycin resistance was included as a selection factor during this particular experiment.
Our biosensor is intended as a spoilage detection device to be used among consumers. However, our project is designed to function entirely on a piece of paper; no organism is required to make it work. The cell-free design is made up mostly of DNA and other components necessary for protein synthesis. These components exist is every cell of every species. The in vitro nature of our final product would remove several potential hazards associated with a device utilizing live cells. There is no chassis organism in the final product which can escape into the environment. The antibiotic resistance plasmids that are used for cloning should never leave a laboratory setting and would not be a part of the final product. Although these precautions alleviate some common concerns regarding the use of recombinant DNA outside the lab, it is important to consider possible unforeseen environmental effects.