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.
In our project, we use 2 kinds of organism, C.elegans and E.colis. E.coli is ranked in the organisms of Level 1 risk goup and C.elegans is icluded in the iGEM White List which means that none of the organisms we are working with will cause any threat to the environment.
Even though the E.coli and the C.elegans 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.
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.
