I Introduction

We clearly understand that experiment safety is extremely important. Therefore, in our investigation and experiments, we always put safety in the first place. Compared with the outcome of our experiments, safety is thought more significant. So, we not only care about how is our project going but also care about safety throughout our research. And we divide this article into three parts to make a sketchy description of our experiment safety.

II Lab Safety

According to the World Health Organization Laboratory Biosafety Manual (Third Edition), our laboratory is classified as biosafety level 1, which means it has no or low individual and community risk, and microorganism inside is unlikely to cause human or animal disease.

When some of our members work in the laboratory, they are required to wear protective laboratory clothes, closed-toed footwear and masks, and those who are not licensed cannot enter the laboratory working area. In addition, in the time we work, gloves should be worn at all the time, and used gloves should be disinfected before throwing into the specific lab-use trash can. Eating or drinking any stuff in the laboratory is strictly forbidden.

All of our team members have already been trained for safety and do researches safely in the laboratory before we start our work. In the safety training, our teacher emphasized the safety importance with students and expounded the aftermath of working with no regard to safety. Therefore, all of us understand the significance of working properly and the consequence of working incorrectly.

In addition, we regard to facility safety as well. For instance, when using centrifuges, we must carefully balance the buckets and trunnions by weight and make sure everything is correct (especially care for the liquor which is splashed). After using ultraviolet rays for vertical clean benches, students should wait for 5 minutes before using it, because of safety reason.

III Environmental Safety

In order to make sure our safety totally, we should care about both the inside—laboratory safety and outside—environmental safety. All used items should be checked to see if they can pour directly into the sink so that we deal with them correctly. For used bacteria and insects, we use high-temperature sterilization to sterilize them before throwing away. For chairs and desks, we use ultraviolet light to disinfect them. Since no high-risk bacterium or microorganism is used in our laboratory, our laboratory doesn’t affect environment harmfully.

IV Animal-Use Safety

Our project is about insects, so we want to test it by using real insects. Although that kind of insect is pretty common in our daily life and can be easily killed, we are still uncertain about if we can really use those insects in our lab. Our lab is biosafety level 1, so probably we cannot use alive insects. Therefore, we are considering only to use the shell of the insect.

After discussing with our Secondary PI Mr. Chen, we chose to only use its shell instead of the alive insect to avoid this problem. The Safety Committee of the iGEM competition also gave us permit on using the insect's shell instead of the real insect. Therefore, we sincerely thank the iGEM Safety Committee for giving us permission to use the shell of the insect. By using it, we not only follow the safety rules in iGEM but also got a better result that could serve as a better prove to our project.

V Mistake & Improvement

Reviewing our experiment progress, we find that we have a lot to improve. We don’t have the emergency for eyewash in our laboratory, which is usual in most American laboratories. Our centrifuges cannot totally make sure that there is no liquid flying out and our refrigerator break down sometimes. Besides, we don’t have any safety facility to deal with fire, thus we must build a fire hydrant inside our laboratory.