Team:DUT China B/Safety
General Laboratory Safety
The iGEM Team DUT_B is in full compliance with the safety and security rule of the iGEM competition.
We have taken several measures to ensure lab safety. Befor we started out eperiments, we had specialized experimental teachers to train us systematically on experimental safety and supervise our experimental operations. Besides, our instructor, who has been engaged in microalgae research for many years with rich experience in Chlamydomonas experiments, taught us and trained us on standard experiments of Chlamydomonas, also supervising our operations and helping us dealing with problems in it. During our molecular cloning experiments, our professors who have rich experience in microbial culture and molecular biology experimental operations conducted us.
Above all that, we have also developed several rules on lab safety. Do not eat in the laboratory and bring a mask to prevent accidental ingestion of potentially harmful substances. Wear protective gloves carefully during the experiment to avoid accidental cuts or scratches, and to reduce the irritation of GoldViewI dye. After wiping hands with alcohol, keep our hands air-dried until the alcohol is completely evaporated, and then perform the experiment operation around the flame lamp.
Close UV light after sterilization of our clean bench and then perform operations under white light. Sterilize the experimental equipment after the experiment is completed to prevent chassis releasing; the experimental waste we use will be placed in a special garbage bag and handed over to the biological waste professional processing company to avoid the environmental pollution of the experimental organisms. When we do plasmids transfer using electricity, we will have insulation measures and have our instructor supervising us.
Project Safety
During our project, we used E.coli to store and amplify plasmids, which is a kind of conditional pathogen. If E.coli, with resistance to antibiotics, flees the laboratory and is exposed to polluted water in the environment, it may cause environmental pollution and infections when invading human body through drinking water. In order to prevent this kind of situation, we made sure that we sterilized every experiment instruments that are exposed to bacteria solution before we reused them or disposed them.
The chassis of our project, Chlamydomonasa reinhardtii, is generally recognized as safe(GRAS) according to the FDA. Although harmless too people, genetically modified alga may over multiply in tamsui rivers if escaping from lab. We are well aware of this kind of danger so we also sterilized the equipment that were exposed to alga culturing medium.