General Lab Safety

Sharing with the Edinburgh UG iGEM team, we had good time in the lab space and working place during iGEM, an advanced wet lab room, the master teaching lab G128/129, and master study room of Peter Wilson Building, King’s Building campus. This lab is sufficient for nearly all of our experiments like PCR, Gibson assemblies, transformations, and restriction-ligation, we also worked in other place including JCMB and Roger Land building in case insufficient working places. All the activities taking placed at above areas except master teaching lab G128/129 were supervised by corelated professors and staffs, following the guidance on requirements for transports of biological materials.

For each team member who already had wet lab working experience for over 4 years, we still accepted enough safety training and had good laboratory practice, past the tests during the introductory week. During our working process, we always followed safety guidance produced by the Health and Safety Department of the University of Edinburgh. During the wet lab time, we always worked with lab coats and gloves, face masks were worn when required, like with powdered reagents such as kanamycin. Long hair was required tied back always, proper devices and equipment like fuming cupboard and fan were used. When using the UV-light, the gloves and an UV protective screen were provided, as well as UV glasses.

For the risk assessment of single substance, group of related substances or a process/procedure as well as any proprietary purchased materials, we fulfilled COSHH forms and executed as indications. The biological agents were assessed and operated properly, there is no pathogen and toxin materials were used in our experiments. For containment controls, the biological hazards, the general waste from labs were treated separately. For all above guidelines and forms, every lab supervisor and student had to read, considered, signed and respected.

For each activities of our project, our technician Annegret Honsbein prepared detailed protocols for us and modified them better against our conditions. Besides, all team members had discussed with Annegret about their own experimental plans separately to make sure safe and accurate operations. During experiment time, three lovely demonstrators always supervised and helped us, other than that, we kept cooperation with Edinburgh undergraduate team to promise better works of each other. Other than the gene modification works, we also carried out tasks for products purification, as well as characterization of the products. For these experiments required for specialized equipment, substances and chemicals, we looked for advices from CTO (the Chemistry Teaching Organizations), the Edinburgh Genome Foundry, professor Louise and Andrew, and operated following their suggestions.

Safety consideration was our first thought, lab workers and students were all respected all the safety requirements to promise safe works not only in the lab areas, but also outside the campus, for example, when we were heading for Scottish whisky distillery places and meetings with other iGEM teams, supervisors always led and guided us.

Safety with Collaboration

In the project collaboration with the 2018 UIOWA team, one of our newly developing parts was delivered to their lab to allow further characterisation and proof of concept for our project. To do this, it was necessary for us to ship parts internationally. We follow the iGEM DNA submission requirement to send off to IOWA team, declaring in the shipment statement that the package contained "DNA (non-hazardous, non-regulated, non-infectious, for research purposes only)". By accomplishing these, we believe we have handled our work with our international collaborators in a safe and professional manner.