Team:Heidelberg/Safety

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Safety

Don't blow up the lab, please

Safety and Security in General

Working safe and secure is the key essential for good lab work. We cannot take the risk of danger for ourselves or the environment. This is why we decided to carefully investigate the characteristics of the chassis and materials we used in the laboratory. We decided to keep distance from infectious particles and viruses. Before starting any work in the lab, we first set up our safety form. We divided our efforts concerning biosafety in the following sections:

Safety in the lab

We got a safety introduction by the BioQuant laboratory team and our Principal Investigator, Prof. Dr. Wölfl. We used a modified E. coli Top10 strain for all of our experiments. This chassis falls under the biosafety level 1 and is up to the current knowledge not pathogenic for humans. However, if handled improperly it can bear risks for the environment. These risks mainly involve organism leakage from the laboratory. This leakage could lead to the transfer of the antibiotic resistance genes Ampicillin, Kanamycin, Tetracycline and Chloramphenicol on selection plasmides to other organisms in the environment. The leakage could also lead to various negative ecological impacts.For example leakage into water may lead to ingestion of the transformed E.coli by other organisms. This may have an impact on their survival.

To avoid any leakage of these antibiotic resistant bacteria from our laboratory, we carefully collected all solid and liquid waste of our experiments. The waste was autoclaved or disposed of according to German law. The BioQuant team supported us with the handling of our waste.

Protecting ourselves

We assured, that we know how to handle liquid and solid waste. We especially focused on the potential hazardous liquids we used in our experiments, such as ethidium bromide and hydrochloric acid.. We defined certain regions in the lab where these chemicals could be used. Cross-contamination was avoided by using certain material sets just for these certain regions.

We did not use the autoclave ourselves but we made sure to arrange with the BioQuant staff how to forward our waste to the process of autoclavation. The BioQuant also provided equipment training for the devices used in the lab and a hygiene training to prevent contamination.

Staying careful

A mistake can happen fairly quickly. For example a contamination may occur because a colleague has not been attentive for a second or because material was incorrectly stored. We agreed on some basic rules for laboratory work:

1. We only work in the laboratory when we are fresh and well rested.
2. We regularly take breaks to relax.
3. We go through our work multiple times a day with a coworker to make sure that no mistakes have happened and to solve insecurities.

Following these rules also helped us to fulfill our lab work in a more efficient manner.

Corona Safety

In our lab and throughout the meetings we always paid attention to the right behaviour regarding corona. Our meetings were held online. In the lab, everyone had their own bench and we worked at the correct distance of 1.5 meters between each other. If this distance could not be adhered to, we used mouth and nose protections. We never were more than the permitted amount of eight people at a time in the laboratory.