Safety
Laboratories are equipped with many chemicals and electrical equipment that could be hazardous. Therefore, it is imperative students and professionals understand and detect safety hazards. iGEM has stressed the importance of lab safety right from the beginning of the competition. Our team strived to eliminate and raise awareness about safety hazards throughout our journey in this competition.
Safety Considerations of our Project Design
Mammalian
- Any hazards with genetically modifying a patient’s own cells for this tech to work?
- Analysis of a light activatable ‘dead-switch’ device that chews up exogenous DNA from the cells. This is supposed to be activated after the cells have created a self-sustaining tissue to ensure the newly generated tissue does not lead to complications after transplantation.
- Once we have produced the 3d printed tissue we should make cells unresponsive to those specific wavelengths so that they cannot be spontaneously activated (e.g. by sunlight)
Barchitecture
- Intimin presents a lot of hazards
- Incorporating bacteria into architecture and public spaces could have potential health and safety implications. Therefore, we considered that in order to incorporate our technology in communities we would need to ensure our bacterial cells were dead.
LIT bulb
- We considered the risks associated with our LIT bulb breaking, and releasing bacteria to the environment. Thoughts we evaluated included: how much bacteria could kill a person? Would people be willing to use potentially hazardous lightbulbs in their communities?
- We read about how we could tackle safety issues associated with our bacterial-powered lightbulb. We decided to engineer a bacterial strain that could only grow under highly defined environmental conditions (e.g. high Hydrogen Peroxide levels). Therefore, if our bacteria was ever released in the environment it would die before it could contaminate its surroundings.
Lab Safety
- We used Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), including lab coats, goggles and gloves, for all our experiments to prevent any physical contact or contamination with biological materials, including GMOs
- When carrying out chemical aggregation experiments, we used a fume hood cupboard to protect ourselves from volatile DMF fumes.
- When performing the IrrE UV crosslinker test, as well as any UV gel visualisations, we used UV protection goggles and operated all equipment following the safety manuals.
