When it comes to lab safety one cannot overemphasize the importance of the issue. Every project needs to have a comprehensive plan to make sure there are no imminent dangers. Especially when dealing with directed evolution one has to assure nothing dangerous arises from the experiments. That is why we decided to abstain from using infectious particles and consider a wider field of peptides that are definitely not dangerous. Additionally, in dealing with the broader public concerns of biosafety have to be addressed since these are the primal origin of people’s fearful attitude towards synthetic biology. We thoroughly considered all these aspects dividing our safety approach into multiple sections:

Mindfulness

The greatest source of dangers is man. If there is a slippery floor without sign it was probably cleaned by a person. If there is a contamination it is probably one of the colleagues who did not work carefully. That is why it is important to always pay attention. We have found that the concept of mindfulness was able to increase both efficient work and subjective well-being. Mindfulness has spread in the Western world in recent years and been accepted by both the scientific and broader community. Mindfulness is described as “a psychological state of awareness, a practice that promotes this awareness, amode of processing information, and a characterological trait” [1]. It is the very concept of being present in the moment and aware of one’s environment. The concept of mindfulness is intended to increase self-awareness to not follow automatisms and become more independent in one’s mind. Also, higher awareness of one’s environment leads to less accidents and more accurate work. This is especially interesting in the lab where minor errors may lead to whole experiments failing. Everyone has at least once forgotten in what tube he already pipetted when preparing a PCR. By incorporating mindfulness in our lab routine we were able to work more effectively and also increase subjective well-being.

Protecting Ourselves

As a basic means to make our lab work safe we attended the safety instruction given by our institute’s responsibility head of biological lab safety. We made sure to know well where to sustainably dispose of general and S1 trash, how to handle centrifuges, fume hoods and hazardous chemicals like ethidium bromide. Apart from that we made sure to divide the lab into zones for E. coli, S. cerevisiae and chemical agents and kept all the potential risks away from the working desks. We also made sure to avoid cross contamination by providing proper equipment for the different working zones. To avoid spreading organisms from outside in the lab and vice versa, we made sure to always disinfect our hands before sitting down at the desk area. In addition to that we also carefully chose our cassis to be yeast, S. cerevisiae because it is known to have a much lower mutation rate than bacteria. Furthermore, we can assure our strain is non-pathogenic as it is derived from S. cerevisiae, which is very important to us thinking of future users of our system. However, we of course wanted to introduce mutations into our plasmids. To make this as safe as possible we used an orthogonal plasmid. This way we were making sure that mutations could only be introduced in certain sequences from the orthorep plasmid and thereby again increased the level of safety for our system.

Climate change is a recent and very important topic. In fact, the Fridays for Future movement has raised great awareness for environmental issues. That is why we have decided to also contribute to the preservation of our environment. Considering the problems coming from environmental pollution with toxic substances or microplastics we decided to design a system that can be used to detect these molecules. We talked to experts from different fields, learning from them about possible benefits our application would have for economists helping them to look out for toxic substances or other contamination in the environment. Thereby our system will help to change the world for the better. Moreover we also thought about our own environmental footprint. In the lab, one always has to gauge environmental protection with safety and workflow. Even though thorough environmental consideration would prohibit or at least complicate lab work, there are always aspects that can be improved by limiting resource consumption. To do so we have compiled some simple actions to protect the environment and help future teams to follow our example and minimise their carbon footprint.

Fellow Researchers & Community

When we developed DYCE our first priority was to set up a working system. However, once we had had the first peptide sequences, it became clear that we would have to make sure there were no harmful intermediate peptides. So when we discussed our project with Dr. Janausch he recommended us to also look out for possibly toxic peptides, to ensure that our project causes no harm to other researchers. Working with dangerous pathogens can often be avoided. In fact, safety in the lab is important to prevent outbreaks outside the lab. Still, the whole danger of GMO release may be omitted by refraining from using dangerous organisms in the first place. Since we worked on the African Swine Fever (ASF) virus we never used whole organisms and relied on peptides instead. Special care was applied when selecting the ASF peptides. We made sure to choose a structural peptide without dangerous enzymatic activity. These peptides provided the necessary identification of ASF while being unable to harm any other organism. In addition, we asked people what they know about ASF in a collaboration with CCU Taiwan. We told them about virus transmission and appropriate safety precautions to help better global transmission by infectious food.