Safety
CCA-San_Diego iGEM’s lab work is divided between two spaces: our school laboratory classroom, and a mentor's lab. Because of the restricted hours at the mentor's lab, the majority of our work had to be done in our classroom, which is shared among many students. Although, a classroom may seem like a cursory environment; we still enforced lab safety. The basic rules included wearing gloves, close-toed shoes, tied hair, no food or drinks, and safely disposing of hazardous materials. It was also important that we bleached the bacteria before disposing of it and kept in mind PPE, safe lab measures, and a clean environment. Our converted student classroom lab contains machines that we purchased or borrowed including PCR machines, a shaking incubator, a 4˚C fridge, a -20˚C freezer, a hot plate, a centrifuge, a vortex, scales, and laboratory reagents. Our school laboratory is a biosafety level one laboratory but contains enough equipment and protection to qualify as a biosafety level two with the exception of ventilation within the lab. The mentor's lab is quite a drive from our school, but it contains a lot of materials, such as microplate readers, reagents, and other laboratory products. We make sure to take appropriate measures in safety when working in the mentor's lab for producing, reading, and analyzing data created there.
