Synthetic biology, or biology research in general requires precautionary safety measures while providing discovers and new designs to improve our quality of living. Although lab experience was not new to most of our team members, we would inevitably encounter something unexpected when conducting independent research. In this section, we show the actions as well as facts that ensure we proceeded through our project, Solar Hunter, safely.
Education: Safety 101
(1) Biology Operation The first step in any safety guarantee is to know what is allowed, what is never allowed, what could happen, and what to do to prevent. Before the opening of our iGEM lab, one instructor (Jing Yang) from the Undergraduate Biology Lab/Platform gave us a lecture on the general safety, stressing on details of the apparatuses we had never used by ourselves before, such as autoclaves sterilizers. The instructor also talked about the emergency such as a fire and safety hazard. We signed an agreement on Lab safety after passing the quiz on safety knowledge and allocated the duty in the management of the apparatus down to each student. With the general education of safety and personal certain responsibility, we started our lab.
(2) In the beginning of operating in the lab on semi-conductor , all of our team members all involved in relevant training of lab safety. For example, the toxity of common organism and the operating rules in the lab. More importantly, we would get together to read MSDS of the chemicals to promise we realized we should behave carefully in the experiments and gain necessary knowledge of the toxicity of the chemicals.
Protection
(1)First level
Every team member conducted experiments with lab gown, gloves and goggles as the first line of protection. To ensure this, our team was censored by a non-regular security check by the safety department of ShanghaiTech University. The department had the right to stop our project when we were spot as unprotected.
(2)When using organic solution or other toxic power, A protective mask is asked to ensure no chemicals will infect through the respiratory tract
(3) In the synthesis experiments, we have to get contact with some high temperature reaction which may put us in dangerous situation so we exactly abided by the instructions of our lab teachers and when we use the heating block, there would be a graduate student to maintain the code of our practice. In addition, we would get familiar with the operation before the experiments. Last but not least, fire-fighting equipment is just 3 meters away.
Materials
However, these protection is not enough. We made our best to reduce the use of dangerous and hazardous strains and materials.
(1)Biology-related
In the biology section of our project, we just handle with risk group 1 organisms , Such as E. Coli, DH5a, BL21, PirLC, and, FAYC002. Both PirLC and FAYC002a are derivatives of BL21 competent cell. In handling our transformed bacteria, we sticked to the rules of the host labs as to where to culture and where to dispose of the bacteria not needed. Since our own lab and host labs were all certified at least S1-safety laboratory, the handling of bacteria should not cause any potential effect on the environment. Especially, our project involves bacteria that secret biofilm, whose intrinsic coherence makes it a nasty element once the bacteria find a surface to grow. We, however, do not think it will be a threat to the environment since the secretion needs the induction of ATC, which is not common outside the lab. In addition, we dispose all the waste in biological garbage in our certified S1-safety laboratory. The waste will then be sterilized.
In terms of other biology-related reagents, we chose the most possible to avoid hazard. We used Goldview, GeneRed, which are assumed to be safer than EB for the nucleotide dye in electrophoresis gel.
(2)Chemicals
Nano materials can be toxic if not handled correctly. We recycled our CdSe, though, by means of centrifugation.
Methyl Viologen(MV), the mediator in our Solar Hunter system is actually the most toxic reagent to person in our project . It is stored in a cupboard, double-locked. In addition, only one person, our team leader Yi Liu was allowed to handle it. Before the use of MV, Liu was trained. Every time, he handled the MV in fuming hood and sealed it with tapes. Although it was toxic, the amount we used was not big, and thus relatively safe, as long as there is no direct contact with the solution. The mediator was not so dangerous once it was added into the hydrogen production system as being diluted. In the environment, the mediator can be degraded in soil to be non-toxic elements.
The experimental materials mainly used in the process of synthesis of quantum dots and nanorods that are associated with safety problems including selenium powder, Cadmium oxide, sulfur power, methanol, ethanol, chloroform, acetone, 1-octadecene, trioctylphophine(TOP). These materials may do damage to human health to some extent if no protection is provided. So we first bought professional gas masks, 3M 2091CN, to every team member of this part and thus we eventually avoid breathing poisonous organism and heavy metal powder floating in the air. As some of the chemicals are smelly, like top, they should be stored in the fume hood and keep the fume hood on all the time to improve the condition of the experimental environment.
