Difference between revisions of "Team:Tongji Shanghai/Safety"

Lab Safety

Safety is prior to all other stuffs especially in the lab.

The Administrative office of Laboratory and Equipment in Tongji University is responsible for the safety of biology labs. Before we freshmen get into the lab and do experiments, we must take some courses offered by Administrative office of Laboratory and Equipment and have several tests to qualify our safety training on the Tongji University website.

After taking the cources and passing the tests, we became familiar with some rules to secure the biosafety such as wearing the white coat and gloves is the necessity before doing the experiment, never bring the experiment materials out of the lab and never eat or drink inside the lab. And later all our members also sign up on a letter of commitment in which we promise to obey all the rules to secure the lab safety and the lab manager has the right to prevent us from continuing the experiments if we did something harmful to safety. We promise to obey all the rules to secure the lab safety as bellow:

1) Experiment participants need to understand the experiment completely.
2) Wear rubber gloves in all experimenters.
3) Necessary steps should be performed in bio-safety cabinet.
4) Fire, electric heaters, microwave oven should not be left while being used.
5) Sterilize all liquid waste and solid waste containing living organism.
6) Sterilize the lab using UV-light every week.
7) 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.

In order to secure 100 percetnt safe, we talked to the lab manager,Sanyun Liu, making sure that all of our experiments on E.coli are safe and also make sure the C.elegans we work with are properly disposed after our experiments.
Even though all the organism we work with are not harmful for the environment and health, we still assume that they may threaten the ecology, so we wear rubber gloves and lab coat when we do the experiments to keep it from direct touching with human body. We also do all the experiments with these living organism in the laminar flow bench to prevent those organism from getting into the outside air. After we do the experiments, we use NaclO solution to sterilizing waste such as the used agar plate and the used tips. What's more, everytime after we finish our work, we use UV light to sterilize the lab.

Bio Safety

The cell toxicity experime nt shows that the toxicity of the AuNRs is dose-related. When the AuNRs concentration is low, it shows no obvious cell toxicity, but it exhibits cell toxicity with the concentration increase.

The cell toxicity is the result of the AuNRs can induce cell apoptosis and autophagy by damaging mitochondria and activating intracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS). Surface modifications have been extensively used to improve the biocompatibility and stability of gold nanorods.

And our results show that with the surface modification of PEG, the toxicity of the AuNRs decreased dramatically. Also the mice we injected AuNRs do not show any different from the control group for now. In a word, all the results testify our material have well-controlled biosafety both in material stability and its cell toxicity.

Environmental Safety

In our project, we use 6 kinds of organism, hcc1997,hela and 293T cell line plus virus ranked in the organisms of Level 2 risk group, while E.coli which is ranked in the organisms of Level 1 risk goup and the mouse which is kept in SPF level. The three cell lines is tested as mycoplasma free. All the risk level organism is treated with sterile liquid to avoid causing harm to the environment.