General Laboratory Safety
The iGEM team CAU_China is in conformity with iGEM‘s safety and security regulations and CAU laboratory safety regulations. All our experiments are conducted in the Innovation Laboratory for Undergraduates, which is in the charge of Professor Qinhong Cao. And our laboratory is classified as Biosafety Level 1(McLeod, 2010; NIH, 2019), hence no pathogenic or infectious organisms posing any hazard are allowed to be used.
All our team members have finished the course Safety Protection of Laboratory during the previous semester and have been trained to conduct specific procedures before they start experiments about our project. We follow the laboratory regulations according to safety and security regulations of the Innovation Laboratory for Undergraduates, the full form can be found here.
For the consideration of laboratory safety when different team members conducting various experimental procedures, apart from complying with the existing lab rules, we have made and implemented several new rules applied to our team.
- Not all team members are experienced with molecular cloning and biochemical experiments at first, thus, we require all our team members, especially the sophomore members, not to conduct experiment alone, and each sophomore member is assigned to a junior member as a partner when conducting an experiment.
- We should conduct experiments in our iGEM-specialized area and clean up the bench after work. Except the marked items in the iGEM Reagent List, all other reagents should be purchased by ourselves, and our member Ruogu Liu, as our purchasing agent, is in charge of purchasing and ordering matters.
- When using autoclave, we should ask a graduate student to oversee the operation.
- All re-usable equipment such as glassware containing experimental organisms waste should be washed with disinfecting water to eliminate all living organisms before washing with detergent.
Project safety
Our project of this year involves several different microorganisms. Apart from Escherichia coli BL21 cells as chassis, Rhodobacter sphaeroides, Rhodospirillum rubrum, Pantoea agglomerans, and Streptomyces coelicolor are used as gene donors. According to the NIH Guidelines for Research Involving Recombinant or Synthetic Nucleic Acid Molecules(NIH, 2019) and ABSA International’s Risk Group Database("ABSA Risk Group Database"), all the organisms mentioned belongs to Risk Group 1, which means they are generally safe and pose no hazard to the human body or environment. And since we have specific rules for our microbial waste, all living cells in the waste would be killed by chlorine bleach or autoclave to ensure no environmental harm occurs. Moreover, the genes from donors we use are naturally located in the genome of organisms with no artificial engineering, therefore, they would do no harm even if they escape from the laboratory conditions. Additionally，considering the impact of antibiotic resistance, our Escherichia coli strains were screened by chloramphenicol, ampicillin and kanamycin.
In addition, since the experiment involves various organic reagents such as acetone, we require the experimenter to wear a white coat, a mask and gloves to conduct the experiment under the specified environment. After use, we have a special waste bottle for recycling and collective treatment, thus will not cause environmental pollution.
As for the potentially dangerous experimental facilities such as ultrasonic crushing apparatus involved in the experiment, all operations were completed under the guidance and supervision of experienced graduate students, thus avoiding the risk that may be caused by improper operation of the experiment,
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