Safety of Our Project

The safety of our team members is an utmost priority. To ensure the safety of our team we made sure everyone from our lab team was properly trained and introduced with safety measures and internal safety protocols in the laboratory supplied by The university of Copenhagen.

For minimal risk during transformation, we choose to use a safe non-pathogenic strain of E. Coli for the initial trial of transforming the plasmid into the bacteria. The laboratory strain does not have the capabilities to survive outside a very controlled environment, which further increases the safety of the experiment. If we had used the intended final strain, Lactiplantibacillus Plantarum, we would’ve had to take further security precautions due to the intended strain not being fit for experimenting, since it can survive outside of laboratory conditions. The functionality of the plasmid is not changed with E.coli, so there would be virtually no difference in terms of results between the 2 bacteria in our tests when studying their properties after the transformation.Furthermore all of our laboratory members previously had experience with E.coli laboratory strains, making it a safer choice for us.

To be allowed to perform our experiments we needed to design the gene modification aspect in a specific manner. The Danish labor inspectorate oversees the permissions and legality of conducting gene modification experiments. To expedite the process of obtaining permissions we reduced the risk and complexity of our gene modification experiments.