Team:Tsinghua/safety

According to the WHO biosafety is the prevention of unintentional exposure to pathogens and toxins, or their accidental release, whereas biosecurity is the prevention of loss, theft, misuse, diversion or intentional release of pathogens and toxins. (From https://2011.igem.org/Safety)

We are always paying special care to the safety of our teammates and the people around. Thus we signed a document to keep in rules about the Safety in Laboratory, not only to protect ourselves but also help to keep a clean and healthy environment.

The model organism we used are harmless engineered strains of Escherichia coli. They are widely used in all kinds of laboratories around the world. We answered the questions about safety on the Safety Page from iGEM(https://2011.igem.org/Safety) as following:

• Q1: Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of:
  • researcher safety,
  • public safety
  or
  • environmental safety
  ?
• A: Our project is about how to use E Coli to simulate the production of Specific Antibodies. No serious safety problem can be caused by the harmless engineering strains of Escherichia coli and we kept our promise and rules which ensure the safety during the whole process.

Q2: Do any of the new BioBrick parts (or devices) that you made this year raise any safety issues? A: No any potential safety issues. Q3:Is there a local biosafety group, committee, or review board at your institution? If yes, what does your local biosafety group think about your project? A: Yes, it is. The safety check is operated frequently. This is organised and operated by the Laboratories and Facilities in Tsinghua University. During our project, they operated one of the safety checks in one year and they evaluated our laboratory as well as our project. Our lab construction is keeping in line with the policies in Tsinghua University and because our project is about how to use E Coli to simulate the production of Specific Antibodies and the models we use are Escherichia coli so they evaluated our project is in a safe category and meanwhile they spoke highly on our Tsinghua iGEM 2011 Safety Manual for "It helps to keep safety in everyone's mind and do really good job.". Q4:Do you have any other ideas how to deal with safety issues that could be useful for future iGEM competitions? How could parts, devices and systems be made even safer through biosafety engineering? A: The most invigorative way to inspire the teams to make up ways to deal with and improve the BioSafety is to establish a special prize in BioSafety, so that many teams could try their best to deal with the issues in BioSafety, like how to take experiments safely, how to build safe BioBricks and mostly how maintain the safe environment during our projects. Also to recognize that importance from the bottom of one's heart is the most effective approach for dealing with some issues. So if more education, announcement, lectures, courses and many other kinds of teaching methods can be carried out to draw attention on the safety, to let people keep this in mind, the Safety Issues could no longer be an issue but a common sense. All the staffs and students operating the infrastructures, devices and anything related with experiments are required to wear the gloves all the time while working. To keep these in rules and in case of any accidents we carried out a document to keep in line with. Tsinghua iGEM 2011 Safety Manual Besides this there is also a document in Tsinghua University emphasizing on the common Laboratory Sfety. Here are the Laboratory Safety Policy of Tsinghua University in Chinese Version and The Laboratory Biosafety Manual released by WHO (World Health Organization) in which Tsinghua University keep align.