Team:Lund/Safety

iGEM Lund 2019

Safety

General Lab Safety

Our main workspace is a BSL1 research laboratory belonging to the Gene Group at the Department of Pure and Applied Biochemistry . Safety measures in full compliance with iGEMS’s safety and security rules was one among our primary focuses in designing and executing our entire project work. The whole team underwent a 5 hour long safety lecture and training session where our principal investigator and responsible researchers gave a thorough explanation of all the General Safety Rules and Regulations present in our lab before we started our lab work. Safety measures in response to the covid situation were also undertaken and practised.


Types of organisms used

We used Escherichia coli bacteria for our project work

  1. E. coli BL21 (DE3)
  2. E. coli TG1

E. coli BL21 (DE3) and TG1 competent cells belong to Biosafety level 1 which means they won't cause any harm to the handler or colleagues in the laboratory. Both of these E. coli strains are considered to be non-pathogenic and unlikely to survive in host tissues and cause disease and are also relatively unlikely to affect the environment.

Project Safety

Our P.I gave us a detailed explanation of various safety rules, regulations, methods and risks involved in handling various instruments, chemicals and machineries which were used in our project. This included elaborations on protective safety wears to be used while performing different experiments, techniques to be used in different experiments, information about first aid kit usage, safety exits, fire extinguishers, emergency showers, ventilation, alarms and further safety and precautionary measures to be taken in case of any emergency.

More insights into the quality of work like sterilization of the equipments and components before and after usage in the experiments, maintaining a sterile workbench and practising good microbial handling techniques in order to prevent any contamination were also addressed by our P.I.

We followed the lab safety practice according to the instructions compiled by the department’s safety coordinator at our university. All experiments were carried out with standard protocols provided by supervisors or experts who have carried out these experiments in prior. Any changes in the working routine were double checked by the supervisor before the work was done. Internal risk assessments were made for all the experiments by the students and were checked by the supervisors before each experiment was conducted. This included risk assessments for each chemical, instrument and technique used in the experiments.

We practised the use of protective clothing, eye protection glasses, gloves during our experimentation work as a safety measure and to prevent any contamination. Handling of hazardous, flammable and volatile chemicals were carried out inside fume hoods. Bacterial wastes were autoclaved before disposal and other waste handling was done accordingly to the waste disposal instructions provided in our university's safety practices.

All the AMPs that we used in the experiment were individually checked for toxicity towards bacteria, humans, plants, fungi and the environment by analysing its properties using various databases and literature studies and were found to be non-toxic and safe to be used in the laboratory environment.

Due to the pandemic, safety measures with respect to number of people working in the lab at the same time were taken. No more than two people were allowed to work at a lab bench at the same time and a safe distance was kept whenever possible during the laboratory work.