Team:Nanjing NFLS/Safety
General Safety
Safety is the most crucial part of our project. Therefore, in our experiments, we not only pay great attention to the outcomes and data but also care much about whether every member is handling a safe material under safe conditions, following safety rules of our lab. Our PI, Prof. Tian, and instructor, Wanli Zhang, are responsible for our safety during laboratory settings.
Lab Safety
Our lab is classified as Biosafety Level 2, which means our lab has moderate risk to our community and uses microbes that pose little to no risk to healthy individuals as well.
As we did all the lab work at China Pharmaceutical University, we use the China Pharmaceutical University biolab safety rule. For example, we strictly prohibit food, drinks, and open-toed shoes, etc. When our members enter the working area of laboratory, they are required to wear protective laboratory clothes, masks, glasses and gloves. Except these rules, we also follow up certain procedures to clean up the wastes like throwing carefully-packaged trash into specific lab-use trash can to ensure that no hazardous material is treated incorrectly. The waste produced in the lab are periodically collected, sterilized and categorized by team members and then recycled by professional chemical waste recycling companies.
In order to ensure that our experiments are conducted under absolutely safe conditions, every member of the team Nanjing_NFLS has been involved in relevant training of lab safety before practical operation, including experimental safety knowledge of molecular biology, lab techniques, introductions to regular apparatus and software, safety of standard operation, personal protection, common emergency response and handling, etc. We make sure that everyone is clearly aware of the significance of experiment with materials properly and the serious aftermath of working with no regard to safety rules.
Specific Biosafety
We use E. coli strains DH10B, HEK293 cells, HepG2 hepatocellular carcinoma cells. Most strains of E. coli, including E. coli strain DH10B, do not pose any risks to human’s bodies. Furthermore, it is unlikely for strain DH10B to survive outside the laboratory, which means they would not pose risks to our community and environment.
While our project has potential in mammalian applications, we choose not to test the gene expression system in vivo or to use mice as a model in our experiments on the ground of animal safety and science responsibility.
Throughout our experiments, we tried our best to pay attention to every safety concern and are fully compliant with iGEM's safety and security rules and policies.