Team:JMU Wuerzburg/Safety

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Safety

Finding out if our primers can not only detect synthetic DNA oligos but also DNA of real Plasmodium parasites made us realise that we actually might have to work with an organism that could potentially cause disease. Malaria is an infectious disease and handling Plasmodium parasites poses the risk of infection when they interfere with injured parts of the skin. Even though the risk of infection with cultured Plasmodium that is not in its vector, the Anopheles fly (and therefore an S2 organism ¹) is very low it still occurred in some cases² , and we intended to avoid working with the parasite itself. Instead, we chose to work only with genomic DNA extracted from cultured Plasmodium parasites. We did not perform these extractions by ourselves but asked laboratories which are culturing Plasmodium parasites to extract the DNA and provide it to us. By collaborating with these labs we avoided getting in touch with the parasite itself and could conduct our experiments on S1 level.

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List of References

¹ https://www.baua.de/DE/Angebote/Rechtstexte-und-Technische-Regeln/Regelwerk/TRBA/pdf/TRBA-100.pdf?__blob=publicationFile, page 46
² https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC88999/