Team:HUST-China/Safety
「Safety」
Overview
Safety has always been significant in synthetic biology, so as a team participating in iGEM 2017,we pay much attention to the safety aspect in our project. It includes safe project design, safe lab work and safe shipment.
Safe Project Design
This year,our project is about absorbing the rare-earth elements (REEs) .Our system consists of the sensing part and the capture part which are based on artificial peptides.
For the sensing part,we replace the iron binding motif with the lanthanide binding tag. If there are some REEs in the water, our engineering bacteria can sense it. But only when the concentration of the lanthanide ions in the environment reaches the threshold, they react.So the bacteria in the condition of no REEs are similar to the common bacteria.
For the recycling part, we use the Si-tag which we did in the previous project of our team to combine the bacteria with silicon to facilitate recycling our bacteria. Once the bacteria have absorbed enough lanthanide ions, the recycling process will be initiated. We can recycle the bacteria that enter the working state through Si-tag and a silicon plate.
In our plan, we will build a device like RBC (Rotating biological contactor). Even if the device exposes to a real environment rather than laboratory, it will work in a relatively sealed condition. Besides, once the REEBOT leaks, they will attach to the silica board or even the sands in nature. We will also design a self-killing circuit so that we can prevent their resistance gene from spreading by adding toxin to the surroundings of devices. That is why we need not worry too much about REEBOTs’ safety.
Generally speaking, we minimize the impact to the environment through threshold settings and rapid recovery.
Safe Lab Work
Safety in Lab work is also significant. Our team has an effective security guarantee on this issue.
Before new members entered the lab, we had organized safety training courses taught by seniors, graduate students and Principle Investigators in our collaborating lab. Members will not be allowed to work in the lab unless they have passed the safety examine. We have trained team members about the standard experiment operation, safety regulations of equipment use and good practice rules in the polluted area.
We have also made several rules about lab safety:
1. Polluted area must be isolated from the normal operating platform. Experimenters are required to wear lab coat and polyvinyl chloride plastic gloves before entering.
2. Toxic reagents must be collected specially.
3. Volatile chemicals involving experiment must be operated in the fuming cupboard.
Safe Shipment
We pay great attention to the safety in sending parts to registry a vital aspect of competition. We would never send liquid sample but only frozen dried material. The sealed 96 well plate was wrapped with enough bubble paper to make sure that it will not be broken. We prepared, packaged and delivered all the stuff according to the courier’s requirements. It is the most important that we followed the biological sample transport requirements demands and provided safety certification materials according to transportation requirements.
