Team:CMUQ/Safety
Safety
The Safety Level of our lab is Level 1 (low risk), our work areas to handle biological materials include open bench and biosafety cabinet. All of our team members have received biosafety training from CMUQ’s biosafety office prior to entering the lab. The training topics included, Lab access and rules, responsible individuals, difference between biosafety levels, biosafety equipment, good microbial technique and chemicals, fire and electrical safety.
Dr. Ravichandra Bachu (rbachu@qatar.cmu.edu) is in charge of the Safety of the labs in CMUQ. The laboratory biosafety guidelines followed by us are the same as Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh. The link to these guidelines is here . Fortunately, we didn’t encounter any uncertainties concerning institutional, regional, national or international rules and regulations.
Regarding our project, the team intends to clone a bacterium which will respond differently to different salt concentrations in its surrounding. As a result of this, we will use the determined salt concentrations to estimate the Sulfate Reducing Bacteria (SRB) populations in the sea water at any given time. Based on this estimate, it will be easier to decide the amount of biocide that should be added to kill the SRB in order to prevent Microbial Induced Corrosion (MIC).
Our project could be applied in the natural environment, as the engineered cells are a strain of E. Coli, which are abundantly found in the environment . Therefore, they do not have any health hazards for the Marine life. Our project does not include the use of gene drives nor animals. Antimicrobial resistance factors are used as they are commonly used in research and all parts used are included in the whitelist.
During the project, only bacteria will be used, DH5a strain of E.coli will be transformed with a proU osmolarity promoter that will detect high salt in the extracellular environment. To avoid any uncertainties or gaps in our project safety, we have worked with one of our PI, who is a Microbiologist and also received guidance from the laboratory technicians.
