Difference between revisions of "Team:NCTU Formosa/Wet Lab/Safety"

No matter how great our products, the most important thing that we need to concern is the safety of the users, producers, and the environment. Bacteriocins are natural peptides and degrade quickly in the environment. However, we need to confirm that the modified E.coli won’t spray into the environment, thus, we cut into 3 aspects to ensure the safety of our product: the training of the experimenter, the level and the rule of the laboratory, and the safety of our final products used in the environment.

Because the modified E.coli may be harmful when released to the environment, our experiments are done in the BSL2 laboratory. All of our team members receive several training courses and pass exams offered by Laboratory Management System before entering the laboratory. Each member must wear the lab coat, trousers, gloves, surgical masks, and shoes when carrying out experiments. Before and after the experiments, we have to use ethanol to clean the gloves and the experiment table. Everybody strictly follow the experimental procedure and never carry anything out of the lab.

In the future, we are going to spray our Bio-stimulator into the environment. To make sure whether the bacteria contain anti-microbial peptide will not exist in the final product, we design the processing standards in the laboratory.

Because our bacteriocins are heat stable, we use high-temperature sterilization to make sure our bacteriocins would not contain any alive E. coli. In order to prove our theory is right. We boiled our bacteriocins for 15, 30, and 45 minutes, and put them on LB Agar plate and cultured it at 37℃ for 16 hours. Compared with the sample which is not boiled, the figure shows the result of the plate and we can see that the boiled samples have no alive bacteria exist. However, we still need to check whether our protein is degraded after boiling. We do SDS-PAGE to test the above samples. The result shows that the peptide doesn’t degrade after boiling for such a long time. Thus, we can produce the efficient products while preserving the safety of them.