Team:SZPT-CHINA/Project/Safety


S Z P T - C H I N A

<!DOCTYPE html> SAFETY
SAFETY
The iGEM Team SZPT-CHINA is in full compliance with the safety and security rules of the iGEM competition. The inherent risks of our biological laboratories are committed to taking the necessary precautions to prevent harm to humans and the environment. For this we take the following security measures. Our completed safety form can be found here.
GENERAL LABORATARY SAFETY
ITEMS Lab Rules
Personal protection You must wear an experimental coat, rubber gloves and closed leather shoes at all times, and you must tie long hair into the hat. Gloves and safety glasses are also required when using corrosive substances such as acids and bases. After the laboratory is finished, you must wash your hands with a disinfectant.
Safety equipment Emergency showers and eyewashes, as well as other emergency equipment, including fire blankets, fire extinguishers and emergency button operations must be trained.
Building safety Must be familiar with the location of the fire exit, fire evacuation plan and emergency room.
Chemical safety The location and appropriate storage methods of different classes of chemicals e.g. in the fume hood, flammables cabinet, and general chemical store cabinet.
Waste disposal Biological waste should be concentrated after high pressure, and sharp waste should be collected. Biological waste should be concentrated after high pressure, and sharp waste should be collected.
Project Specific Lab Safety
To ensure that our products do not harm humans and escape into the environment, we must consider not only general biosecurity, but also the special safety of our projects.
Here is the measure we took.
  • Replace antibiotic resistance
  • Non-pathogenic organism
  • Prevent biological escape
Replace Antibiotic Resistance
Antibiotic screening labels are one of the commonly used techniques for biological transformation. But this also has the potential for potential antibiotic contamination. To avoid the risk of antibiotic resistance, we replaced the erythromycin resistance of the original expression vector of the original lactic acid bacteria with the resistance gene nisl, a well-recognized food preservative, nisin.
Non-pathogenic Organism
The lab we work is classified as biosafety level 1, which means that the microbes used pose little danger or even are harmless to human body. In particular, the microbes we use for the project are Escherichia coli (strain DH5α and BL21) and Lactic acid bacteria (strain MG1363), which pose no harm to individuals or environment.
Prevent Biological Escape
Although we consider the safety of engineered bacteria from various sources such as genetic sources, biological chassis, and resistance, it is not unreasonable to be careful about biosafety. Therefore, it is very necessary to design a suicide mechanism that can be controlled.
We designed a safety mechanism based on the difference in the substance between the human body and the environment. When probiotics are excreted in the feces, glucose is deficient in the environment, and glucose starvation induces the T-acrp promoter to overexpress the autolytic enzyme gene (acmA).