Team:Tsinghua/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 to use E. coli to bind to and transport target proteins in the media. 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 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:Our lab work is supervised by a safety group at the microbiology lab. Whenever reagents with safety concern is involved, for instance, ethidium bromide, at least one member in the group will watch us all the way to ensure no danger might be incurred during our operation. Besides, supervisors from Tsinghua University also scrutinized our bench work. During one routine check, they asked us a lot of questions on safety and praised us for the great caution and the excellent protection measures we took during our experiments.
• 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.
• 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.