Team:Ruperto Carola/Safety/firstdraft

Safety

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. We considered various aspects of our dry and wet lab approach to keep ourselves, our peers and the whole environment save. 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 concerned all these aspects dividing our safety approach into multiple sections:

How we protect…

… ourselves

As a basic means to make our lab work safe we attended the safety instruction given by our institute’s responsibility head of lab safety. We made sure to well know 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.

Having dealt with all the basic measures to make the lab safe, we noticed that one comes to use a lot of hand disinfection. It is known that groups that have to meet high standards of hand disinfection are more endangered when it comes to conditions of the skin. [SOURCE] Thus we decided to implement a skin care plan. [ILLUSTRATION] Before work and during work an appropriate use of skin care products such as specialized ointments and balms may reduce the risk of skin disorders drastically [SOURCE]. [Stressfreies Arbeiten: genug Pausen, Arbeitsplan, Achtsamkeit]