Team:HKU-Hong Kong/Safety

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Safety
Members of our IGEM team members were required to attend a pre-lab training offered by the Department of Biochemistry, the University of Hong Kong before gaining access to the labs. The training was divided into 2 sessions, including a talk and a laboratory inspection, which serve to ensure all our team members are aware of any potential dangers in the lab. The Department of Biochemistry has provided and maintained a safe environment, in compliance with the Occupational Safety and Health Regulations for every team member.

A. Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of:

  1. Researcher safety

    2. The answer is no. Before doing laboratory work, we attended the laboratory inspection along with a safety talk held by our safety chief to strengthen the awareness of laboratory safety in addition to our personal protection. Moreover, information pamphlets on safety issue have been distributed to all of our IGEM team members as a guide.

  2. Public safety

    3. In general, we will be using E.coli strains DH10b and DH5a to conduct plasmid engineering. These strains of E. coli are not known to cause harm to humans as well as animals. According to the Biosafety manual of the World Health Organisation, these groups of bacteria belong to the “Risk Group 1”, and “Biosafety Level 1 – basic”. Nevertheless to play safe and avoid the spread of E.coli, it is our practice to collect bacterial wastes, used agar plates, eppendorf tubes, and other laboratory apparatus in separate containers and sterilize them by autoclave before disposal. Bacteria, therefore, can hardly be dispersed. Hence, there is a very low potential that the public will be harmed by our bacteria.

  3. Environmental safety

    4. There is no way that our experiment bacteria can spread outside our laboratory. Thus, the external environment will not be contaminated by our experiment bacteria. This is actually a common feature in many other researches.

B. Do any of the new BioBrick parts (or devices) that you made this year raise any safety issues?

    No. There are no safety issues raised by the new BioBrick parts because they do not pose any risk to humans as well as the environment.

C. Is there a local biosafety group, committee, or review board at your institution?

    Yes! The Safety Committee of Department of Biochemistry in the University of Hong Kong. We discuss the biosafety aspect with the safety committee members at every stage of our progress. The committee concerns safety issues in three areas in particular: general, biological and radiation. Each area is under the supervision of different safety officers.

D. 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?

  1. We would like to suggest the use of a data book which is specifically used for recording the strains of bacteria, chemicals, all the other reagents and materials that are used for implementing the designed project. Moreover, it should include the ways of discarding wastes. For instance, many different methods and ways that we use to handle the wastes (eg. bacteria waste) are recorded in our lab. From this, we may be able to trace if there is any escape of bacteria or other substances to the environment. This information is suggested be posted on the iGEM wiki page so that when reading the wiki page, other people will understand biosafety of the project and will not panic about safety concerns.
  2. To achieve the goal of biosafety, stringent measures may be considered to enforce safety regulations at times when necessary.
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