Team:Nanjing NFLS/Safety
Safety.
Go to "Experiments" and "Safety" from bottom navigation bar.
General Safety.
We clearly understand that safety is the most crucial part throughout our project. Therefore, in our research and experiments, we not only pay great attention to the outcomes and data but also care much about whether every member is handling a safe material under safe conditions, following safety rules of our lab. Our PI, Dr. Wang, and our secondary PI, Dr. Bai, is responsible for our safety during laboratory settings.
Lab Safety.
According to the Third Edition of the World Health Organization Laboratory Biosafety Manual, our lab is classified as Biosafety Level 1, which means our lab has low risk to our community and uses microbes that pose little to no risk to healthy individuals as well.
As we did all the lab work in Southeast University, we use the Southeast University biolab safety rule. For example, we strictly prohibit food, drinks, and open-toed shoes, etc. When our members enter the working area of laboratory, they are required to wear protective laboratory clothes, masks, glasses and gloves. Except these rules, we also follow up certain procedures to clean up the wastes like throwing carefully-packaged trash into specific lab-use trash can to ensure that no hazardous material is treated incorrectly. The waste produced in the lab are periodically collected, sterilized and categorized by team members and then recycled by professional chemical waste recycling companies.
In order to ensure that our experiments are conducted under absolutely safe conditions, every member of the team Nanjing_NFLS has been involved in relevant training of lab safety before practical operation, including experimental safety knowledge of molecular biology, lab techniques, introductions to regular apparatus and software, safety of standard operation, personal protection, common emergency response and handling, etc. We make sure that everyone is clearly aware of the significance of experiment with materials properly and the serious aftermath of working with no regard to safety rules.
Specific Biosafety.
We work mainly with E. coli DH5alpha, one of the most common lab strains. In our project, we utilize 293T, HepG2, HeLa, A549, Hepa1-6, HL7702 cell lines to test the function of the gene expression system in vitro. All mentioned materials belong to Risk Group 1 and pose very low risk to the community.
While our project has potential in mammalian applications, we choose not to test the gene expression system in vivo or to use mice as a model in our experiments on the ground of animal safety and science responsibility.
Throughout our experiments, we tried our best to pay attention to every safety concern and are fully compliant with iGEM's safety and security rules and policies.
Reference.
WHO Laboratory Biosafety Manual (Third Edition), World Health Organization. (2004)
Southeast University Biolab Safety Rules Guidelines