Team:Elan Vital Korea/Safety
Safety
About Biosafety
Team Elan Vital understands that biosafety is about preserving the health of people and the environment of the experiment alike and we conducted our experiment with those factors in mind. Undergoing strict security guidelines, our team performed all experiments by adhering to all areas related to biosafety. From preventing mistakes to making sure that no matter what happened, safety issues would be reduced to a mild and manageable extent. We conducted all experiments under the appropriate protocols for the materials we would be dealing with, and we as a team made sure that all safety issues were taken care of and were constantly considered whenever we participated in an experiment.
Basic Information about our Experimental Safety Procedures
All experiments were conducted at Gachon University’s Molecular Biology Laboratory.
We followed the CDC code for Biosafety Level 1, designed for “work involving well-characterized agents not known to consistently cause disease in immunocompetent adult humans, and present minimal potential hazard to laboratory personnel and the environment” (CDC, Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories 5th Edition). Safety precautions include:
| - | mandatory gloves |
| - | goggles to protect eye |
| - | no consumption of food or liquid, or any activity that could bring potential infection from the hand to the face, such as applying cosmetics |
| - | minimize creation of splashes or aerosols |
| - | Procedures for sharp materials, of which we only had to deal with broken glassware since we used no sharp materials |
| - | For broken glassware: do not pick up or clean up directly with one’s hands, but remove using tools. |
| - | separate waste receptacles for biowaste |
| - | autoclave decontamination of all materials for bacterial cultures |
| - | decontamination by disinfectants on hands and laboratory surfaces |
| - | Protective laboratory wear (e.g. a lab gown) |
| - | proper measures depending on the infectivity of our bacteria (in the case of E.coli, which is the only bacterial species we are using, very little) |
| - | Protective eyewear if we had any hazardous materials, of which we had none |
Our Laboratory Facilities were also within requirements, with conditions such as:
| - | Doors for access control |
| - | Sink to wash hands |
| - | Alcohol to disinfect hands |
| - | Easy cleaning environment |
| - | Bench tops that are resistant |
| - | Nonporous surfaces on chairs |
| - | Windows have screens |
Similar guidelines can be found here:
http://www.cdc.gov/biosafety/publications/bmbl5/BMBL5_sect_IV.pdf
Possible Threats and Risks
The possible risks of our experiment are also very low, even if infection occurred in some sort of way. But just in case, we also minimized such risks by changing the bacteria we were working with, as well as in deciding what materials we were working.
Our original project, which we modified in order to reduce chances of possible infection and harm to general public health, was on MRSA, a methicillin-resistant strain of Staphylococcus Aureus. Upon discovering that MRSA bacteria is a high dangerous bacteria that could harm the human body easily and is not permitted for experimentation by iGEM, we decided to remap our project, undergoing clear measures to make our project much more safe and secure. We did this by changing our subject bacteria from MRSA to E.Coli, which poses much less risk.
We also considered safety when we used a safe strain of E.coli, called TOP10 (Invitrogen). It is a strain of naturally competent cell, without risk of infection or danger to humans and the environment. As mentioned, we never used any sort of dangerous biological agent, and the only bacteria we used was E.coli, since we tested antibiotic resistance in naturally competent cells.
Conclusion
Our group’s main focus was obviously the project, but safety was an issue we always had in mind. Even when conducting experiments, safety was first and we always clarified what we were doing and how we were going to do it according to our protocols before going into an experiment. We followed a rigorous code for our Biosafety Level, and conducted experiments in a safe environment.