The lab we used for our project this year is an level two disease lab associated with Dalhousie University and with the Nova Scotia Health Authority (NSHA). Because of this, we had many resources for maintaining our health and safety such as Dalhousie’s Biosafety Office, our supervisors Dr. Lois Murray, Dr. John Rohde, and Dr. Zhenyu Cheng, and the biosafety guidelines that pertain to NSHA labs.

In order to maintain our safety, we were consistently wearing personal protective equipment like lab coats, gloves closed-toes shoes and safety glasses when necessary.

Where it was applicable to do so, we used biological safety cabinets (BSC) with HEPA filters. The BSC - and also the laminar flow hoods – were used to protect our samples from contamination. All biohazardous consumable materials, such as pipette tips, serological pipette’s, agar plates and more, were place in biohazardous waste bags and disposed of according to NSHA policy. All contaminated liquids and reusable materials were autoclaved when appropriate and decontaminated with 70% ethanol or 10% bleach when autoclaving was not an option. Situations where autoclaving was not available includes decontaminating plastics and contaminated glass beads for examples. Lab surfaces were always decontaminated with 70% ethanol before and after use.

Our project provides unique biosafety challenges because we are working with fecal samples containing many unknown bacteria. Being unaware of what a sample contains makes things complicated when attempting to be bio-safe. In order to ensure our safety, we were extra vigilant with our decontamination procedures and personal protective equipment. Contact with the fecal samples themselves was limited as DNA extraction and serial dilutions for plating was all that was necessary from the fecal samples themselves.

All bacteria cultured from the fecal samples were mostly unknown as well, so extra care was taken with these samples to ensure our safety. These samples were worked with inside a BSC and were not left to overgrow. They were disposed of through biohazardous waste bags according to NSHA policy.