Team:IISc-Bangalore/Safety

  1. Lab Safety
  2. Gas vesicles
  3. Anabaena
  4. Strains

Lab Safety

These photos depict relevant safety features of our lab.

Lab entry rules are clearly posted outside the lab: no external footwear allowed!
A typical biosafety cabinet in our lab
Our fume hood, used for handling potentially hazardous chemicals
Waste disposal facility and hand wash station

Gas Vesicles

We are using purified gas vesicles from Halobacterium salinarum NRC-1 (a model archaeon) to demonstrate aggregation, but will not be working with the live organism. These gas vesicles are entirely non-immunogenic as demonstrated by in vivo studies in mammalian systems — they are non-toxic and harmless to humans.

Anabaena flos-aquae

We planned to culture Anabaena flos-aquae (UTEX 2557) and extract gas vesicles from it to test our methods of inducing clustering. This strain of Anabaena was chosen as it has lost the ability to produce anatoxin-a and is axenic (no bacterial contamination).


This strain of Anabaena was chosen due to these Curator's notes

Strains

We used common lab strains of E. coli for our chassis. DH5α was used for cloning due to its high transformation efficiency and its recA and endA mutations. BL21 (DE3) was used to overexpress our fusion protein under the T7 expression system as it contains the gene encoding the T7 RNA polymerase.