Team:Rock Ridge Virginia/Safety

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Safety in iGEM

Our classroom worked as our lab this year, we had 23 members in our team but usually 10 will show up to our meeting everyday. This system really worked for us and kept our space safe!. We had two projects this year but we only focused on the "Bacteria mimic" or "Living bacteria" Our chassis for both projects is DH5-alpha bacterial cells.

Safety risk level assessment for vaccine platform project

We are going to use 4 structural proteins from Lyme: OspB: Level 2 OspC: Level 2 DbpB: Level 2 DbpA: Level 2 One protein from Bacteria Ftsz: Level 1 Based on this data, we have assessed that we require a lab with a biosafety level 2.

Safety risk level assessment for "Bacteria mimic" or "Living Vaccine" project

Wolbachia Bacteria: WSP:Level 1 Jelly Fish GFP: Level 1 Coral RFP: Level 1 Based on this data, we have assessed that we require a lab with a biosafety level 1.

Safety Precautions

• Since we cannot experiment with ticks, not only because of school regulations but mainly because of the difficulty of working with them and their reproductive cycle. We decided to test the vertical transmission of our bacteria in flightless Drosophila melanogaster. To minimize the chance of this organism escaping the lab. We confined the flightless-flies in a separate room right next to our lab and they were inside an incubator. We are also planing on adding an inducible kill switch as our project progress since we cannot precisely anticipate its how it will behave once it is released into nature.

Other safety precautions

• We viewed the safety videos available through iGEM
• We used good house keeping techniques
Such as wearing gloves, keeping the lab space clean, using new pippet tips and autoclaving/bleaching samples, and sanatizing the work environment with 70% ethanol