Team:SJTU-BioX-Shanghai/Safety
SafetyWe visited Professor Shi Jianxin and communicated with him. After we briefly introduced our project to him, he dicussed the following aspects with us.
We dicussed several ways to deal with used bacteria for a long time.
Prof. Shi told us that because our product is a portable device, so it is of great significance to consider cautiously how to deal with used bacteria. Live bacteria will have pollution on surroundings and will have unexpected harm to human being though we are using the most commonly seen bacteria E. coli.
We fisrt wanted to have the bacteria burnt. We considered it reasonable because people can reach fire or other forms of combustion. But after talking with Professor Shi, we realized that this method will have some problems. For instance, it will cause pollution of gas emissions. What’s more the test paper is difficult to ignite, etc.
The second method we put forward to stertilize, is using fungicides. Our team members suggested using disinfectant (its main ingredient is NaClO) people can reach in their daily life. But Prof. Shi thought its concentration is not high enough to kill bacteria. There is a difference between disinfection and stertilization. But he told us if we use higher concentration of NaClO for an overnight treatment ,we can successfully inactivate bacteria. Thus safety can be ensured. What's more, some acids like HCl which have the function of cell lysis can also be accepted.
We also thought of having used papers recycle. Most people lack proper methods to deal with bacteria, but we can recycle these papers and treat them in lab environment. In lab, bacteria can be treated by acids completely while gases will be absorbed. So biosafety is achieved without pollution to the environment.
When we asked whether we will have some safety problems in our lab, Prof. Shi told us that we do not have to worry about that. Because labs in Bio-X Insititute have strict safety regulation and the environment is sure of biosafety.
He told us we need to make sure that all the parts we use is safe.
Parts we use can be demonstrated safe. Firstly the following parts are in the part collection: sfGFP (BBa_K515005), eforRed (BBa_K592012), amilGFP (BBa_K592010), cjBlue (BBa_K592011), amilCP (BBa_K1357009). The As promoter is the part BBa_J33201 provided by iGEM2006_Edinburgh. Lastly the lac operon is from a commonly seen plasmid duet pCDF duet-1.
