Team:Freiburg/Safety

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Safety

Safety Instructions

Every member of our team received an instruction for general lab safety from Dr. Nicole Gensch, the official safety instructor of the BIOSS (Centre for Biological Signalling Studies). Furthermore, our team received a special training for correct handling and disposal of liquid nitrogen from Dr. Johannes Kaiser, the executive director of the BIOSS. As we had to perform some of our measurements in a specialized lab at the ZBSA (Center for Biological Systems Analysis) we also received a safety instruction for their spatiality from Dr. Günter Roth.

Lab Safety

In order to avoid any harmful influences to one of our precious team members all lab work was performed in accordance to the German regulations for lab safety (GUV-R 120, TRBA 100). This includes, but is not limited, to the following examples:

• Wearing personal protection equipment like lab coats, safety goggles and rubber gloves if needed
• Consuming any food or drinks in the lab area is prohibited
• Smoking in the lab area is prohibited
• Autoclaving all waste that came into contact with biological material is mandatory

Minimizing Risks

To further reduce the possibility of a potential dangerous situation happening to one of our team members, we designed our project to be as safe as possible.

Dangerous Chemicals

We tried to avoid using dangerous chemicals whenever possible. We completely prohibited the use of ethidium bromide for example and used Midori Green as safer alternative to dye our DNA gels. We also restricted all use of this chemical to a small and clearly labelled area of the lab.

Biological Hazards

Because of the nature of our project, working with antigens derived from pathogenic organisms was unavoidable. To nevertheless ensure safe working conditions, we decided to use only proteins that have no virulent or toxic potential. Furthermore, we tried not to use whole proteins but only immunogenic epitopes. Like this, the detection of antibodies was still maintained while at the same time not using whole functional proteins.
To further reduce the risk of biological hazards we only used harmless lab strains of E. coli (risk group 1) for cloning and expression of all of our needed plasmids and proteins.

Working Structure

By using a seminar room of the University of Freiburg for relaxing, meetings and all kind of organisational work we were able to reserve the lab for actual lab work. This clear cut between lab and office work helps to prevent unnecessary complications and contaminations that might occur in a hectic and overcrowded lab.