Team:OLS Canmore AB CA/Safety
Safety
This year the Our Lady of the Snows Catholic Academy iGEM team has taken into consideration and put into action many different safety practices in order to keep everyone in our school, community, team and the world around us safe. With these considerations taken into account, we are confident that when our project is successful, it will benefit everyone. Our project will benefit those in municipalities who are currently dealing with hair buildups in water treatment facilities by allowing them a more efficient method to deal with clogs, and also those farmers currently involved in the poultry industry, by not only eliminating their feather waste but also by allowing them to utilize the byproducts created by our construct for the creation of useful products. These benefits however, can only be taken advantage of if our construct is safe. If we continue to practice basic lab safety, lab safety education, the creation of a safe construct and keep thinking ahead to the future when we are going to test our construct and how to safely implement it, we are confident that we will create a safe construct ready for proper implementation in the poultry industry and in wastewater treatment both locally, and on a global scale. |
This year our safety concerns were focused around two major things. The first one was that our project could at some point, in the near future, be released into municipal water systems or onto farm environments and our second concern was that we attend a pre-K through twelve school, with our lab just off the main science lab. These two main points have meant that we must take safety into consideration both in and outside of a lab setting. Everyday we take simple precautions to make sure that us and everyone in our school remains safe. These important precautions are simple but very effective including wearing lab coats, goggles, gloves, locking doors of our lab at all times, washing our hands after lab work has been completed, and tying back hair while working in the lab. We sterilize all of our equipment before and after we use it and use 70% ethanol clean the counters in the lab. We have also undergone certain education in order to know how to be safe in the lab have also learnt important lab safety training, in which all iGEM team members, and supervisors have learnt Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System (WHMIS), material safety data sheets (MSDS), aseptic technique, proper sterilization techniques, and biosafety and wet-lab safety protocols. These safety precautions are not very complicated but very important when eliminating risks concerning our project, particularly when you take into consideration that some risks our project poses at the laboratory stage include: bacterial contamination; contact with harmful acids, nucleic acid stains, restriction enzymes, keratinase; burns caused by a flame or warm glass or metal. |
We have also taken into account some more complicated precautions having to do with the creation of our construct and the different forms of bacteria that we will use to build it. For the basic construction of our project we have planned to utilize an IPTG inducible promoter but we plan to put a different promoter in the construct for implementation, as a way to allow for a control while testing it within the lab in our assays we will perform but plan on putting a different promoter in the construct, to make sure it is safe for implementation, as well as an efficient and cost-effective method, due to the cost of IPTG. We have also planned to implement a strong kill switch into our construct to allow for ultimate safety if ever the enzyme were to get into the environment or denature. The strain of E. Coli we are using is K-12, a genetically modified, non pathogenic bacterium which has a low probability of survival outside of a petri dish. Furthermore we do not plan to experiment with any other organisms besides our chassis E.coli, a lab strain that is not harmful to humans. We have grown our bacteria on plates that contain different antibiotics such as ampicillin and chloramphenicol, and placed a resistance to the antibiotic within the constructs to help ensure that our bacteria do not grow outside of this setting and that the bacteria that does grow is indeed the bacteria we need and want with our construct inside. |
For our tests in the near future we will be performing both a quantitative and a qualitative assay in order to test the effectiveness of our project in more than just one way. These quantitative and qualitative assays will be performed on both real hair and feathers meaning that we must take into consideration certain safety precautions. Many of the steps we will take to ensure safety will be our basic lab safety precautions such as wearing gloves and goggles, however some will be more complex such as learning to deal with the byproducts of the reaction, and how to extract them safely to potentially be put towards a new product, and in which conditions we should perform this test to keep all students at our school safe from anything given off by our assays. We will of course maintain our safety standards while measuring in our assays to ensure our construct can be the best it can be. |
Safe implementation is one of our teams largest concerns as many people in our community, as well as elsewhere will be affected by our project after implementation due to it being designed for use by those in wastewater treatment plants, poultry farms, and at rendering plants. Because these are such big industries, that affect people on a large scale, we must ensure our construct will not be able to harm them in anyway, by doing numerous tests before we take it outside of the lab. Doing so, we must make sure that our construct is not only easy to use by easy to use safely. When considering our implementation process and the precautions we must take to do so safely for everyone who would be affected, as well as ourselves, and needing to undergo more practical development in the next few years, we strive to achieve a safe, working construct. At the current moment in time we are taking into consideration different ways to prevent leaks or exposure of our construct into the environment, water source, and general public. Because we live in a wildlife corridor outside a national park, the environment is of huge importance to us. We do not want our construct to leak into the ecosystem and cause potential harm, so containment is the best plan. In order to prevent leakage and thus contamination, we have been working on creation of a containment chamber for our enzyme that will be safe and easy to implement on a mass scale. Through extensive research we have determined that a membrane bioreactor also known as a MBR would be the best way to safely contain the enzyme. Membrane Bioreactors are the absolute safest option for a containment vessel in wastewater treatment facilities and on farms due to them being closed containers. Many self clean and are built not to break with ease (1). |
In conclusion our team has taken into consideration many different safety aspects when working on our project, these safety precautions include basic lab safety, lab safety education, the creation of a safe construct and through thinking ahead to the future when we are going to test our construct and implement our project. |