Team:SJTU-BioX-Shanghai/Safety
Safety
Overview
Experimental safety is the primary point that must be paid attention to in all experimental studies, and this is no exception in the iGEM competition. Even under the attack of COVID-19, we were still well prepared for conducting experiment in future. More importantly, we have always paid attention to everyone's physical condition throughout the project, and received professional training on epidemic prevention and control before returning to school to reduce the possible adverse impact of the COVID-19 epidemic on us.
Fortunately, none of our team members were infected.
Besides, in order to ensure experimental safety, individual safety and societal safety, we have collected measurements in lab work as below.
Click HERE to see our safety form
COVID-19 Risks
COVID-19 did have an effect on 2020 iGEM, but we still choose to move forward in the difficult situation. In response to the call of the World Health Organization, we strictly abided by the epidemic prevention and control arrangements during and after returning to school. We measured the body temperature of team members every day, and ensured that public areas such as laboratories and offices were disinfected and cleaned daily.
General Lab Safety
Due to this special situation of 2020, we were not allowed to visit the laboratory until July, no matter conduct experiments. Even though, we still invited teachers and advisors to give us a brief introduction of our laboratory online, so that we could immerse ourselves in lab-work as soon as possible once we got the permission.
While we gathered offline, we were taken to get acquainted with the laboratory and were familiar with the placement of various reagents, the position of equipment, the location of the safety exit and the escape route after visitation. After that came careful and meticulous training stage for every wet-lab group member.
Below are some rules that we keep in mind all the time.
Project Safety
In our project, we used three strains of E. coli as chassis, DH5α, BL21(DE3) and MG1655. E. coli is classified as risk 1, which means it can be brought to people is minimal. Specifically, we used strain delta-MG1655, which was knocked out the rpoZ gene from genome. This gene knockout would not do harm to normal growth of E. coli, so there is little risk when using it. Later, plasmid PWJ66 was used to express omega subunit fused with dCas9 in delta-MG1655, and plasmid containing sgRNA, target/lure site and report genes (such as RFP and eGFP) were used to express our fluorescent reporter system for further screening. Although CRISPR in our experiment cannot be avoided, we carried out experiment on non-toxic E. coli to minimize the risk.
SJTU-BioX-Shanghai
contact us
Contact us: sjtuigem@gmail.com or sjtuigem@gmail.com
Bio-X Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Dongchuan Rd. 800
Copyrights © 2020 SJTU-BioX-Shanghai
