Team:CIDEB-UANL Mexico/safety riskanalysis

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Overview
IGEM CIDEB 2014 considers biosafety as important as every other points of the iGEM competition. Because of this reason, the team decided to perform a Safety Risk Assessment focused on the project and in the lab practices needed to accomplish it.
In this assessment, a description of our host organism is made, along with the genetic modifications that were applied to it, including preventive measures to avoid its dissemination and appropriate identification and containment measures, in the case it was released into the environment. Also the overall potential risks of the project were included, taking in consideration all of the possible risks of working in our laboratory, along with preventive measures to reduce risk to a minimum.

Organism’s Description
Escherichia coli (E. coli) is a large and diverse genus of bacteria belonging to the Enterobacteriaceae. Although most strains of E. coli are relatively harmless, some can potentially affect humans and animals. Pathogenic kinds of E. coli can cause diarrhea, along with urinary tract infections, respiratory illness and pneumonia, among other symptoms. E. coli can be commonly found in the digestive tract of humans and many animals. It plays an important role in the decomposition and absorption of certain nutrients in the intestine that the body cannot break down by itself and to also prevent the digestive track to be colonized by other harmful bacteria.
E. coli are capable of both aerobic and anaerobic cellular respiration, which is a characteristic that allows them to live in both oxygen rich and oxygen poor environments, which has allowed them to thrive in a wide variety of ecosystems.