Difference between revisions of "Team:Jilin China/Lab Safety"

This year our team concerns about environment pollution and biosafety problems. We designed a Geneguard system based on natural toxin/antitoxin(TA) system. Our aim is to control the population of the microorganism we plan to use--E.coli. So a device was built to examine whether the TA system could work. We proved that our Geneguard system could work as expected, so we applied this system in our environment problem solution. Our final device was loaded with TA system and phenol sensor. As we planed to use our engineered E.coli to deal with industry waste water in the future, the TA system could guarantee the slow growth of E.coli when there is no or a low concentration of phenol. When they are exposed to phenol chemicals, antitoxin will be expressed to repress the effect of toxin and specific enzyme will be expressed to degrade the chemicals.

Prior to starting our wet lab work, all our team members learned the laboratory safety principle of our school and took a training about experimental equipment using. Those preparations allowed us to keep in mind the potential safety issues in the lab we were going to work in and what we should do to deal with emergency problems.

The principle of laboratory safety could be summarized as following:

- Protective equipment should be wore to avoid direct contact with pathogenic microorganism or toxic chemicals.

- Keep in mind the location of emergency showers and eyewash, as well as the fire blanket and fire extinguisher.

- Different classes of chemicals should be stored at appropriate condition.

- Biological safety hazard waste should be collected and handled in specific ways.