Team:Tsinghua-A/Safety
Overview
This year Tsinghua-A iGEM Team is trying to explore the ability of genetic regulation pathways to reduce noise and accurately convey information. Here we are going to share our experience in safety control.
Safe Project Design
Does your project include any safety features? Have you made certain decisions about the design to reduce risks? Write about them here! For example:
- Project design is foundational:
- Choosing a non-pathogenic chassis:
- Choosing parts that will not harm humans/animals/plants:
we do not have a specific real-world application. And all of our experiments are only in the lab. So there is little risk our project will pose. We just want to figure out the ability of genetic regulation pathways. It is theoretic and will cause no harm to the society.
We use E. coli (lab strains that are non-pathogenic) for doing the cloning and carry out the measurement in HEK293 human cell line.Experiment with any other organisms besides the chassis is not carried out.
Harmful parts are not allowed in our project. The parts in our project are most commonly used florescent proteins, which are harmless. So none of our parts would raise any safety issue according to the current professional knowledge.
Safe Lab Work
According to the requirements of iGEM policy, in our daily bench work we never performed any dangerous experiments or faced any unusual safety issues. Our bench work followed some basic regulations as below:
- Duplicating a key to the laboratory without permission is strictly prohibited.
- Experiment participants need to understand the experiment completely.
- Necessary steps should be performed in bio-safety cabinet.
- Fire, electric heaters, microwave oven should not be left while being used.
- Sterilize all liquid waste and solid waste containing living organism.
- Sterilize the lab using UV-light every week.
- The last person to leave the lab should make sure that water, electricity, gas, and air conditioner has been closed, and doors and windows has been locked before leaving.
We take a lot of actions to reduce the risk at the laboratory stage:Wearing rubber gloves and masks,Disposing waste in a standard way and Decontamination of all work surfaces when work is complete, etc.
Safe Shipment
As mentioned above, our DNA parts are absolutely safe because they encode the proteins such as florescent protein. The DNA parts are safely contained within PCR tubes as registry Parts requires.
