Team:SZU-China/Safety
Safety
Nip the unsafe in the bud.
--The Book of Changes
Safety is extremely vital in research since DANGER lies everywhere. Hence, strict experimental operation and standardized experimental spaces are essential to ensure the individual, societal and natural safety. SZU-China understands the inherent risks of working in a lab facility and aims to take all necessary precautions to ensure no personal or environmental harm occurs. To this end, we have implemented the following safety procedures below. Our completed safety form can be found here. (click Safety form for more information).
Personal safety
Equipment safety
Chemical safety
Building safety
Waste safety
-
Being equipped with lab coats, protective goggles and disposable gloves
-
Tying back the long hair
-
Following the safety rules of lab all the time (Fig. 1)
-
Taking the appropriate protective measures when working with harmful materials, such as UV-light and hazardous chemicals
Fig.1 Safety Rules of Lab
-
Operating emergency showers and eyewash properly, as well as other emergency equipment including fire blanket, extinguisher, and the panic button
-
Checking if the equipment works properly and never using the obsolete or unsafe equipment
-
Following the manual of the equipment
-
Classifying the different chemicals and storing them via appropriate storage methods in a proper place
-
Never using the extreme poisonous chemicals
-
Using the fume hood to avoid the leakage of volatile toxic gases
-
Remembering the location of fire escapes, planning the fire evacuation and having the contact information of first aid officers
-
Never staying in the lab alone
-
Inactivating all the experimental organism before releasing them outside
-
Sorting the waste according to the waste disposal rules and disposing them in an appropriate way
Gardenia Blue is a safe, non-toxic, natural and edible pigment that is dark blue powder and can solve in water. The Chinese government has added it to the list of health standards for additives in 1990.
Our project utilizes just one organism this year: E.coli BL21. According to DSMZ, it is defined as the Risk 1 Group with low potential risk. In our wet lab, all the upstream genetic engineering operations, such as transformation, vector expression and protein measurement, are strictly obeyed the regulations and supervised by teachers or elder students.
We plan to add a suicide system to the engineered bacteria carrying the above three enzyme genes.
We will use iGEM19_SZU-China's suicide part BBa_K2912017, and look for a glycine controller to replace its Tryptophan attenuator (from BBa_K2912014), and the rest remain unchanged. We hope that this controller can sense changes in the glycine concentration and turn on subsequent gene expression when the glycine concentration is higher than 1%. When we add more than 1% glycine to the bacterial solution, the R-bodies proteins that lyse the cells can be expressed.
After we add glycine, the pH of the solution will just trigger the modification of R-bodies proteins, lyse the cells and release the enzymes. This will allow us to directly add the substrate for the production of gardenia blue to the bacterial solution and proceed directly to the synthesis reaction. In addition, bacteria that have not been lysed will be killed by the continuous high temperature during the production of pigments. The residue can be washed away after dyeing.
All of us have undergone basic lab safety training from our experimental courses of our university. In addition, our instructors spend one week to ensure that we have obtained enough theoretical knowledge. Moreover, our team members, who participated in 2019 iGEM, teach us a series of experiments to make sure that we get enough practical experiences. There are three main guidelines:
-
Hardware: There should be essential experimental equipments that function normally.
-
People: All the people performing experiments should be trained strictly.
-
Software: Complete regulation systems should be set up.
The three guidelines are supplementary to each other, and also help us achieve two essential goals.
-
Make sure that all the people performing experiments will not be infected.
-
Make sure that the environment will not be polluted..
Team members who violate safety rules are subject to the supervision and reminder from the experimental staff until they are believed to be able to perform the experiment individually without supervision any more. In the situation of multiple infractions or ignoring the safety rules, the member will be asked to write a critical self-review, get training again and will not be allowed to do any experiments for one month.
