Team:Fudan-CHINA/Safety

Safety
"I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary. The evil is does is permanent."
Safety was one of our top priorities during our project design and accomplishment. So we took it seriously and strictly followed the safety rules.
Safe-project Design
Chassis
In our project, we chose non-pathogenic strains of E.coli—DH5α, BL21 to perform our molecular cloning and protein expression separately and they were worked inside a class 1 laboratory.

We also use mammalian cells—293T and HeLa to test our system. And all cell experiments were operated in the biosafety cabinet which we would use UV light to sterilize both before and after usage.
Parts
The parts contained in our project are mostly commonly used expression control units and that are used widely by worldwide researchers, so they will not raise any safety issue. At the same time, E.coli and cells transfected with our project were strictly controlled. Once they are no longer needed, they will be autoclaving and abandoned immediately, so that there won’t be any contamination to the environment.
Safe Lab Work
Safety training
The whole team attended a serious of safety lectures and passed the laboratory safety knowledge test, where we learnt how to use experimental apparatus properly and how to deal with potential dangers as well as sudden accidents in labs. We also took tests to qualify our ability before getting into the lab.
Lab arrangement
Our lab is divided into two areas—wet lab and the bench. So we can keep our computers or other stuff there avoiding being contaminated.
Clothing
We’re required to wear lab coats, gloves whenever in the lab. There’re also two kinds of gloves in the contaminated and uncontaminated areas which could not be mixed. Short pants and open-toe shoes are banned.
Safety labs
We had the key to the laboratory kept strictly. Any duplication without permission is prohibited. The last person who left the lab should make sure that electricity, air conditioners, water have been turned off.
Equipment
We have well-designed fume hood, explosion-proof equipment and eyewashers to deal with different unexpected situation. We also had a cabinet for Hazardous reagents whose key is kept only by our PI.
Procotols
We have protocols for every experiment which mainly followed by biochemical company or adopted by many researchers.
Disposal
There are different bins for chemical pollutant and normal waste separately. Furthermore, our school carried out a regulation which is having specialists to treat the waste uniformly.
Biological hazard
All reagents and cultures are kept in a sealed containers. Plates containing E.coli are sealed with parafilm before storage at 4℃. Once plates and wells are not required, we destroyed them by autoclaving.
HP SAFETY
We Fudan-CHINA also care much about safety during human practice.

In our public engagement, we did several interesting experiments with kindergarten kids. (See More) To avoid cultured bacteria from the environment making threats to those children’s health, we seal the plates with parafilm and sterilize with ethyl alcohol before handing out. We also urge them to wash hands after class.

We helped a high school build a team to attend next year’s IGEM. (See More) We spent several days teaching them lab safety and how to deal with unexpected situation.

To get a further understanding and discussion about safety, we also made a phone interview with Health planning Commission about laws and regulations related to safety. (See More)
Shipment safety
Our DNA parts are absolutely safe because they contain safe expression control units and express harmless protein like GFP. All of our parts are safely kept in PCR tubes as Parts registry requires.

  Address



G604, School of Life Sciences, Fudan University
2005 Songhu Road, Yangpu, Shanghai, China