Team:NUDT CHINA/Safety
SAFETY
I.Researcher Safety(CLICK)
1. Before we start our experiments, our advisors gave us a wonderful lesson about Lab safety. And our advisors often come to our lab to check in the whole process of the experiment, therefore we can get instructions on time.
2. As for electrical safety, the electrical engineer of the lab showed us the circuit layout and told us details about the use of these equipments. When finish the whole experiment that day, we take turns to check these electric appliances. Before using every kind of equipment, we read the instructions over and over again to avoid any safety problems, and we cut off the power immediately when do not use them. Particularly for using centrifugal machine, it is significant to make sure that you have already balanced it and covered the lid well before centrifugation.
3. We are enforced to wear gloves, masks and lab coat once we enter our lab. Because EtBr is considered to be a kind of mutagenic material, we choose GEL-RED as substitutes. However, as it is a kind of nucleic acid dye, we separate a special area for the preparation of agarose gel and agarose gel electrophoresis. In this area, we need to wear two pair of gloves to touch anything.
4. We only use few kinds of toxic chemical reagents( such as glacial acetic acid) and we put them in the fume cupboard, any relevant operations are all done in the fume cupboard.
5. We use DH5αand BL21(E.coli) which are proved to be safe for human
6. As our lab is a new building where the concentration of formaldehyde is very high and it is harmful to our body, we buy lots of activated carbon masks to avoid breathing in too much formaldehyde. What’s more, we buy bags of activated carbon and put them in various places. And the electric fan and air-condition was always working for those days.
7. Everybody has to sterilize his/her hands and all the equipment platforms with alcohol solution (70%) before and after each experiment.
II.Public Safety(CLICK)
1. It is prohibited to bring anything in the lab out including gloves, masks and lab coat. Therefore each time we get out of the lab, we have to take off lab coat, gloves and wash hands with hand sanitizer.
2. The abandoned bacteria can only be thrown away after high temperature and high pressure sterilization. All collected lab waste are sterilized, packaged and executed.
3. We use DH5αand BL21(Ecoli) which are proved to be safe for human, we ensure that none of the genes or parts that we were assembling would act as virulence factors, and that no known pathogens would be involved in our research. And the production GFP and IAA do no harm to human, too. We work with microorganisms that belong to risk group 1 exclusively.
III.Environmental Safety(CLICK)
1. All genes were cloned into either pSB1C3 or pSB1A3, both of which are non-conjugative, preventing horizontal transfer of our parts.
2. Our chassis bacteria have not acquired any characteristics that would enable them to compromise human immune system/other systems or evade detection and destruction by the former or facilitate spread between people/animals, which makes them harmless from both a personal and public health point of view.
3. Our parts are all safe for human, and we use LacI as promoter, which guarantees that our bacteria won’t produce large amounts of protein if not induce the expression. On the other hand, our production are GFP (Green Fluorescent Protein) and IAA (Indole-3-acetic acid) , both of which do no harm to our environment. What’s more, the expression level of these two production are both very low through our final detection.
