Team:Heidelberg/Safety
GENERAL GUIDELINES
Synthetic biology and biological research in general can provide vastly usable new techniques to improve our quality of living. Nonetheless, one should not forget that biological engineering requires precautionary safety measures. In this context, safety has to be understood on multiple levels.
Firstly, the researcher needs to secure himself from any danger conveyed by what he is working with. Secondly, on a larger scale, society needs to be kept safe from anything that could escape the lab or be released and thereby impose a threat - that is the immanent responsibility of the scientist. Finally, the samples one works with can be sensitive and easily degraded, hence by safety measures, researchers also secure their projects.
Concerning software, the same levels of safety exist: The data entered by researchers need to be protected, misuse of the software of any kind should be prevented and the software itself needs to be secured.
As were both, working with genetically modified organisms and designing a software, all of the above measures need to be thoroughly considered. We therefore here describe the different approaches we took to guarantee safety and thereby laying the basis for having a great summer. Also, we read about the official safety guidelines proposed by the iGEM HQ online. Watch the two videos below for further good instructions on lab safety!
GENERAL SAFETY AND GOOD PRACTICE
Before starting with the wetlab work, Dr. Barbara DiVentura gave us a safety instruction in which she informed us about how to work in the lab and what was considered as good practice.
The first step towards good lab safety are personal precautions such as wearing lab coast, gloves in regards to the handled matter and safety goggles. As we have been working RNA which is highly sensible to contaminations, we cleaned a part of our lab using hydrogenperoxide. During this act of cleaning we wore special mouthgards so that we would not breathe in any of the potentially harmful chemicals.
We not only separated a RNAse free part of the lab, but also designated a special area for running gels, as we would be handling chemicals like EtBr and SYBR Safe for staining. We tended to use SYBR Safe, as it is proposed to be less toxic and as we wanted to keep the use of dangerous substances as low as possible. Other dangerous chemicals, such as beta-mercaptoethanol, TEMED, organic solvents and acrylamide were of course handled under the fume hood.
Besides the different working sections, we also separated programming and documentation from bench work, as we decided never to handle any electronics wearing gloves. With regard to that, we were very lucky to have access to our own office two floors upstairs from our lab. There we had enough space for several computers and laptops, so that the programming could be safely separated from the lab work.
As a precaution against spread of modified organisms, equipment and benches were regularly cleaned using EtOH. Also, we used designated trashcans for any living matter that were then autoclaved afterwards. We were highly sensible regarding possible spillages of E. coli as that might ruin our RNA based experiments, because of which we chose not to use certain parts of equipment for cells in order to keep them clean and our samples safe.