General Safety Considerations

Safety at the ETH Zurich labs

Responsible conduct during everyday lab hours is parmount for the prevention of accidents. Every new person in the ETH D-BSSE lab must undergo safety training instructed by a Technical Manager. No exception was made for our iGEM team. Though much of it is common sense and our work was restricted to Biosafety Level 1, we still want to repeat the most important guidelines to you:

Lab personal equipment

Lab coat use is compulsory in all of the labs and is essential for proper protection in case of chemical spills and splashes. In our lab, the collars of all lab coats are colour-coded: a green collar is for normal labs, a yellow collar is for working with radioactive substances, and a red collar is for Biosafety Level 2 labs. Of course, they are not allowed in dining areas!

In addition, it is highly recommended to wear safety goggles all the times in the lab, as accidents may be caused by you or those around you. Goggles are essential to avoid getting chemicals into our eyes, they are of no use sitting on top of your head!

Gloves are the third essential piece of personal equipment. They can only be used once and must be removed with care to avoid any contact of contaminants with the skin. No gloves can be worn outside the lab, as small traces of chemicals might be on them!

General lab rules

No smoking, eating or drinking is allowed in the lab. Chemicals have to be properly labelled. Nobody wants to find suspicious looking bottles when they come back after the weekend!

Doors should usually be kept closed. This allows for proper ventilation, can allow for the maintenance of negative pressure in labs that require it, and might be helpful in case of fire. Chemicals have to be stored in an orderly fashion, never above eye level and not in others' way!

Use of specific machinery

• Centrifuge: must be always properly equilibrated. An unequilibrated centrifuge can be lethal if it dismantles at high speed.

• Balance: must be kept clean at all times! No one wants to find a suspicious unknown powder spread all over the place.

What to do if an accident occurs?

• I spilled and entire bottle of ethidium bromide on my lab coat!

  You need to get out of the lab and take an emergency shower immediately. It is better if you also take off potentially contaminated clothes.

• I forgot to put my goggles on and now I have sulphuric acid in my eye!

  There are eye washers in every lab. The eye(s) should be washed for about ten minutes and a doctor must be visited afterwards to check the state of the eye to see if it suffered any damage.

• My E. coli are on fire!

  First, do not panic! Panicking can lead to the fire spreading. If the fire is small, it is possible to use a fire blanket to cut off its oxygen supply. If it is difficult to isolate or if it is a chemical fire, then it is better to use a CO₂ fire extinguisher. Also, emergency services have to be called just in case the fire gets out of control.

Safety of our MicroBeacon CTC detection system

Method of Safety evaluation

To manage the risks associated with our MicroBeacon CTC detection system we used the following scheme to evaluate possible adverse scenarios and the effectiveness of countermeasures:

Preventive measures can either serve to decrease the likelihood (x-axis) or the severity (y-axis) of a potential scenario.

Handling genetically modified organisms

Since our MicroBeacon E. coli cells are genetically modified they might harbor a potential and unforseen risk to the environment. However, our MicroBeacons do not express any toxic substances and the fact that they prefer temperatures around 37 °C makes it unlikely that they survive for a long time when accidentally released. We originally planned to have the MicroBeacons express TRAIL as a means to induce apoptosis in targeted cells. However, wie decided against this in order to minimize any potential health hazard.