Researcher Safety

We attended a general health & safety induction and were given a safety tour of our lab involving guidance in waste disposal of sharps, trace chemicals, and biohazardous material.

As a risk reduction measure we opted to use Qiagen kits rather than phenol based protocols.

Ethidium bromide is an intercalating agent(inserts into the DNA helix) in common use in laboratories as a means of detecting nucleic acids through agarose gel electrophoresis. As ethidiumbromide distorts the structure of the DNA helix, it is a mutagen and carcinogen.To avoid the risk of exposure to ethidium bromide, we decided instead to use GelRed stain in our agarose.

E.coli MG1655 is a disabled K12 strain which is non-pathogenic and is used for research purposes only. Salmonella is an LT2a strain which is attenuated making it non-pathogenic. This strain is allowed to be handled as a class 1 pathogen rather than class 2 so is not categorized as a biohazard.

While working in the lab, we are supervised by our instructors, advisors or lab technicians from the University’s School of Life Sciences Learning & Teaching staff.