Team:William and Mary/Safety

Page Title

Safety

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Project Design

  • Choosing a non-pathogenic chassis

    • We chose E. coli strains that all had a non-pathogenic chassis including JS006 (wild-type), 5-alpha, and 10-beta (lab strains). It is classified as Risk Group 1 microorganism on the Safety Whitelist .

  • Choosing parts that will not harm humans / animals / plants

    • The parts that we have chosen to use do not harm human, animals, or plants. The research that we are doing is all foundational, thus all our experiments will be conducted in the lab with the goal of providing additional knowledge about our natural world. The parts we are using are variants of reporters (fluorescence protein), inducible promoters, and proteases. These parts do not target cells of human, animals and plants.

Lab Work Safety

Our lab is a Biosafety Level 1 lab, which means that none of our reagents are known to be pathogenic in healthy humans. There are numerous safety procedures that we use in lab every day that comply with the BSL-1 precautions. Whenever we are working on wet lab procedures in lab, we always wear gloves and make sure to take them off before we leave lab. We also always empty our small trash bins into our BSL-1 trash receptacle before we leave the lab for any reason. We ethanol down our workbenches and any equipment we believe might be contaminated. We keep our lab passcode protected to keep a control on who can access the lab. In order to make sure our lab equipment and liquids sterile, we bleach and autoclave them on a regular basis. No food or drinks are allowed in our lab at any time and we make sure to wash our hands after working in the lab. Closed toed shoes, long pants, and tied up hair are all required before entering the lab. Before we started doing anything in the lab, we had our PI, Dr. Margaret Saha, train us in basic lab safety such as specific BSL-1 lab protocols that we needed to follow. Over the spring semester, we had training on how to do simple lab procedures like pipetting, waste removal, working under the fume hood, as well as specific protocols like the Gibson Assembly Pipeline. Early on in the summer, we had a two-hour biology lab safety session in which the Director of the Environmental Health and Safety Office at The College of William and Mary gave us a talk about important safety regulations that we needed to follow in all biology labs over the summer. Everything we are doing in lab follows the protocols approved by William and Mary Institutional Biosafety Committee.


Link to full safety page
Pictures of the lab