Team:UAlberta/Safety
SAFETY
Safety Awareness
The University of Alberta iGEM Team is proud of the safety we practiced throughout this project. Our remarkable safety culture at UofA adheres to the guidance and tools provided by the Risk Management Services units of the University of Alberta , in order to ensure proper safety practices minimizing potential risks in our workplaces. Furthermore, by acknowledging policies and requirements established by the university’s Environment, Health & Safety (EHS) unit, we are prepared to react adequately in any case of emergency during our practices.
Safety Training
Every member of the team took part in a series of rigorous training sessions. First part of this process consisted on the completion of 3 online courses, Laboratory and Chemical Safety 2018, Concepts in Biosafety 2018, and WHIMS 2018, all of them provided by the EHS. Next step was laboratory on-site training which was divided mainly into two days of intensive laboratory orientations on common practices, and important emergency locations. Such orientations were conducted as required by the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering, department in which our lab was located.
Special training on certain pieces of equipment that required particular training was also provided by personnel with the necessary expertise to administer such training.
Laboratory Safety
Personal Protective Equipment consisting of closed toe shoes, long pants, safety glasses, gloves,and lab coats were used on every single laboratory session during our project. The laboratory where all of our work took place is classified as Containment Level 2. Although all the microorganisms employed in our experiments were classified as Containment Level 1, our iGEM team adhered to the requirements needed to work on a Level 2 laboratory. Important locations such as eye-wash stations, emergency showers, spill kits, and first aid kits were all readily available and acknowledged by all team members.
As indicated in the safety orientations, all waste was properly disposed in the corresponding areas. This included for example, the proper placement of materials contaminated by mutagenic reagents such as ethidium bromide into special waste bins, and appropriate management of biohazards. Sterilization took place at the start and at the end of each experiment, and special treatment of materials before disposal was performed accordingly, for instance bleaching cell cultures before dumping them down the drain.
Product Safety
As our product will be handled by the beekeeping population, we wanted to ensure that it would be safe for them to come in contact with our biological product. There are two main aspects that ensure the safety of the beekeeper and that of the bees as well, our application, and the contents of our product.
<The Beetector is to be used by real people in their workspaces in other words, our product never comes into contact with the hive, ensuring the safety of the bees. Consequently, the application of our product is completely isolated from the consumable products of the beekeeper, such as the honey produced by its bees. This also ensures that there is no health hazard to the customers buying the honey or any derived products, and thus it does not affect the integrity of the beekeeper nor its business. The beetector is a contained system.
Second aspect that makes the Beetector reliably safe is its contents. The active microorganisms of our product are genetically engineered bacteriophages, as these types of viruses only infect bacteria, its Biosafety Level is determined by the host bacteria of the specific phage. In the case of our bioengineered bacteriophage, its host would be Escherichia coli, a Containment Level 1 organism that poses low risk to public health and the animal population, according to the Canadian Biosafety Handbook. [1]
Our product also provides an enclosed quenching solution consisting of a low risk reagent made of 5% bleach and water that would ensure the elimination of phages after the beetector has been used. This eradicates any possibility of risks, and ensures the beekeeper of a completely safe disposal of the product so as to not compromise its bees nor its products.
Safety Outside the Lab
Our impeccable safety practices were implemented not only inside the lab but in many other places as well. Safety awareness of biological procedures were extended to a variety of audiences including young students that attended our talks about our projects during their participation in summer camps. Beekeepers were also consulted to explain the safeness of our product and consider their perspective, as synthetic biology can be misunderstood as a dangerous practice sometimes.
As our work involved handling bees, adequate safety equipment such as a beekeeper suit, gloves, and mesh veil for personal protection were used.
References
[1]Public Health of Agency of Canada, Canadian Biosafety Handbook, Ottawa, ON, 2016.