Team:QHFZ-China/Safety
_SAFETY_
Safety is the foundation of the experiment. Knowing the importance of laboratory safety, QHFZ-China did a great job in experimental safety.
Here’s what we did--- 1)We had a list of lab rules, which reminds us to do the experiment in a conformable way. In addition, we also have emergency showers and fire extinguisher to avoid accidents.
2)During the experiment, we paid attention to protect ourselves, we put on lab clothes and wore gloves. Masks were usually also needed. Bacteria and cell experiments were carried out in the biosafety cabinet.
3) Our lab is equipped with ventilation devices, there are multiple doors and ventilation system in cell room. All of these above ensure the safety of experimenters and biomaterials during the experiment.
4) No toxic substances were used in this experiment. We used safe nucleic acid dye to replace ethidium bromide. 5) There were at least one teacher being present whenever there were students in the lab keeping safety. 6) We strictly observed the rule that the food and water are not allowed in the lab and also the equipment from the lab are not allowed to bring out. 7) When entering the cell room, everybody must take off their shoes and sterilize their gloves by 70% alcohol. 8) Bacteria solution was treated with disinfectant overnight and discarded. Consumables which were contaminated with bacteria solution and cell culture medium were collected and then discarded after high-temperature sterilization.
9) Before we entered the laboratory, our instructor, Cheng Li, gave us a lecture on biosafety which benefited us a lot.
10) While we were helping BEAS_China to carry out the experiment, we involved heavy metals, during which all solid and liquid garbage were packaged and sent to Fankang Meng, the instructor of BEAS_China, for professional treatment. And to fully protect us, the experiment was carried out at specific place in out lab by our advisor, Xing Zhang.
11) No human blood samples, urine samples, saliva samples or any other related samples were used. 12) Our bacterium and cells all used the usual chassis biological model, whose harms were low. In future applications, to the bacteria (used for uric acid detection), we will develop a cell free system to avoid the escape of the bacteria to the environment [1]; to the mammalian cells, we plan to add a biosecurity module, which is a suicide device, to ensure the safety of users [2].
[1] Huang, A., Nguyen, P. Q., Stark, J. C., Takahashi, M. K., Donghia, N., Ferrante, T., . . . Collins, J. J. (2018). BioBits Explorer: A modular synthetic biology education kit. Sci Adv, 4(8), eaat5105. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aat5105 [2] Di Stasi, A., Tey, S. K., Dotti, G., Fujita, Y., Kennedy-Nasser, A., Martinez, C., . . . Brenner, M. K. (2011). Inducible apoptosis as a safety switch for adoptive cell therapy. N Engl J Med, 365(18), 1673-1683. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa1106152
