Safety
Safety is an important part of laboratory work. To make our work as safe as possible we received instructions about safety from one of our PIs, both theoretically and physically, before any laboratory work was started.
Team:Linkoping Sweden/Safety
Safe Project Design
Our project this year did not include any species or special experiments that could be a risk or harm. We choose to conduct our experiment in E.coli bacteria. The strands we choose to work with was NEB-5-alfa, BL21 DE3 and XL1 blue. These strands fall under risk group 1, thereby following iGEMs own regulation. Regarding “substituting safer materials for dangerous materials in a proof-of-concept experiment”, this is not applicable for us because the "dangerous" (Amyloid-Beta) is central to our project and not interchangeable.
Safe Lab Work
Since we have been working with species from only risk group 1 there have not been any extra special thoughts of safety laboratory work around them in particular. The daily routine and work did of course involve always wearing lab coats, wearing gloves and working in a cabinet when handling our DNA to make sure it would not get contaminated. We also worked in cabinets when handling more toxic chemicals. The most dangerous chemical we worked with was ethidium bromide (EtBr). We used EtBr every time we had run a gel to dye our DNA-fragments and working with this chemical was handled with extreme care. To make sure a sterile working site while handling with our bacteria, we used a gasol burner. In order to not start a fire, we always worked extra carefully when we handled an open flame. During our laboratory work we have been using three different antibiotics - Ampicillin, Chloramphenicol and Kanamycin. Chloramphenicol and Ampicillin can both be autoclaved and sterile and then flushed down the drain. Since Kanamycin can tolerate heat/autoclaving and have unknown properties it must be submitted for combustion to make it unharmed. The experiment we performed using Kanamycin was during our practice of “the standard experiments” and we got some lab material from our university. It was the Tau-protein in the Takara plasmid which had the Kanamycin resistance. As an alternative method to lysis our cells, we used liquid nitrogen. This liquid can cause badly frostbites. To prevent this, the person who experimented always used gloves, goggles and lab coat. We also worked with open doors in the lab to increase the ventilation, in case the oxygen level would sink to low. Another everyday laboratory safety has been making sure to sterilise the lab benches and to throw away the pipette tips, bacterias etc. in special waste.
Safe Shipment
When sending our DNA, both for sequencing to Germany and for Sample Submission for the Registry, we followed all protocols, did not encounter any safety concerns and had no trouble sending them.
