Team:ShanghaiTechChina B/Lab Work/Safety
Safety
Over the past few months, our team worked primarily with E.colis, which are ranked in the organisms of Level 1 risk group. We attempted to utilize our engineered bacteria to help treat IBD, so we considered as much as we can to ensure the safety of our entire project--not only the design of our therapeutic methods, but also our lab work.
Safe project design
In addition to non-virulent strains of E.coli, none of the new BioBrick parts that we constructed raises any safety issues.
At the end of our therapeutic schedule, we introduce “Kill Switch”, which is in charge of terminating these engineered bacteria. With the loss of control, we considered, this kind of engineered bacteria may cause the horizontal gene transfer, especially in complex environments such as intestines. Thus, we design two kind of kill switch to make sure that our bacteria cause less side effects. Meanwhile, this strategy makes our project more complete as well.
How did we solve the niche vacancy after we turn on the kill switch? Our solution is “Warship”, a bacteria constraint device designed and constructed by ourselves. As expected, we found out that this container can guarantee the protective effects in both sides through a series of experiments.
Safe lab work
All students received related safety training. We must study the course called “The Experiment Safety” before we start doing the experiment. In this course, teachers introduced us the matters needing attention and strategies in dealing with the unexpected incidents through various cases.
To keep ourselves and our samples safe, we wore proper personal protective equipment (in the form of gloves and a lab coat, as well as eyewear when necessary) at all times in the lab. As our project mentioned, our team did nitric oxide related experiments. We dealt with NO producing chemicals (sodium nitroprusside) in a fume hood.
