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.

The whole team attended a serious of safety lectures 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We have protocols for every experiment which mainly followed by biochemical company or adopted by many researchers.

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.

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.

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)

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.