Team:BGIC-Global/Safety
It's all about safety...
We lay stress on safety in all aspects throughout the project: training before the experiments, experiment design, deploying the experiment, product design and refining, creating safety video, and raising awareness from the society.
Experiment design and implementation
We consider safety implications when designing our experiment. Since formaldehyde is a toxic gas, we conducted experiment in a fume hood, so that all the toxic formaldehyde released will be absorbed by the hood. We also wear goggles, mask, and lab coats when conducting the experiment. To ensure that there will be no contact between the formaldehyde and skin. The image below shows one of the members of the team working at the fume hood:
When dealing with formaldehyde, we extracted 15 nanometer of liquid formaldehyde and placed in a pipette cap. We insert the pipette cap inside a glass bottle which we designed using a tweezer, and opened the cap. We then put the formaldehyde-detecting device in the bottle, and seal up the bottle using 3M scotch tape (the glue-free one). The device ensures minimal formaldehyde has been used, and could be disposed easily and safely as it is put in a cap. The following image shows the device.
Product design
In order to eliminate the potential risk of bacteria leakage from our product in newly renovated houses, we design a filter screen that can prevent bacteria from escaping, and we will have instructions and safety notes for customers. We plan to use freeze-dried bacteria powder, instead of live liquid bacteria for our product. What's more, if time is available, we will try to find out a kill switch that can limit engineered bacteria's living space to the equipment that filled with medium provided by us.
Safety video
In order to further promote the importance of safety in iGEM projects, we collaborated with TU-Delft and produced a Biosafety video, which contains members different teams around the world that attended the EurAsian Meetup’s perspectives on biosafety. We also provided expert’s review on the importance of biosafety.
Raising social awareness
We promoted biosafety in public as well. To raise awareness about the dangers of formaldehyde in work/home places and possible solutions to remove it, we established a “Manual on Formaldehyde”, and disseminated the manual in our neighborhood (in both China and US!). The sources of information are from our research on the current international and national standards, policies, as well as our interactions with several well-known 3rd party test organizations. We even got to conduct a public Shenzhen at Shenzhen Senior High School.
