Safety
Prior the start of our summer lab work, each member of the team took an online lab safety course courtesy of our university to ensure that we were trained in the handling and disposal of biohazardous materials before we arrived. The course consisted of a series of informational videos on safe laboratory practices followed by quizzes that gauged how much we retained from the online training. All of WPI’s laboratory safety requirements and materials can be found here.
In addition to our training in general laboratory safety practices, we ensured that our project and any protocols we adopted in pursuit of our goal were aligned with WPI's biological safety policies and requirements. All biological safety materials were referenced in conjunction with the use of relevant protocols and practices.
Both our chassis and the species of origin for each of our chosen antifreeze proteins were considered to be non-pathogenic and therefore very safe choices for our work. E. coli, our chassis organism, is a biosafety level 1 organism. While many of the exact biosafety levels of our antifreeze protein origin species' are not known, most of the organisms we chose proteins from are commonly consumed by the public or are usually harmless to humans, such as Rhagium inquisitor (a species of longhorned beetle), Daucus carota (a species of wild carrot), and Leucosporidium antarcticum (a species of yeast found in the cold seas of Antarctica). Though we used antifreeze proteins from many species, none of these species were actually used in the lab, as we had the sequences of their antifreeze proteins synthesized by IDT. A complete list of species from which we used antifreeze proteins can be seen below:
