Team:KAIST Korea/Plus Safety
From 2012.igem.org
2012 KAIST Korea
Mail : kaist.igem.2012@gmail.com
Twitter : twitter.com/KAIST_iGEM_2012
Facebook : www.facebook.com/KAISTiGEM2012
Kaist, KI Building
Safety
1. Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of:- Researcher For researcher safety, KAIST iGEM 2012 team follows rules of KAIST biology labs. Every researcher of our team wears latex gloves and lab coats in the lab which are sterilized frequently by spraying 70% ethanol. When treating toxic and volatile reagents, such as TEMED (the reagent used in SDS gel), we use chemical hood. Among several toxic reagents, potential carcinogens are those that are treated most carefully. To minimize the use of carcinogen, we do not use Ethidium Bromide (EtBr) in gel electrophoresis. Rather, we use RedSafeTM nucleic acid staining solution (CHEMBIO) to stain DNA samples when running gel electrophoresis. Since this reagent is said to be non-toxic, non-mutagenic, and non-carcinogenic, we believe using this reagent when making agarose gel would lessen the threat to researchers as well as to the environment. In addition, acrylamide, a component of SDS gel, is known as a potent neurotoxin hence we always wear latex gloves when preparing and running SDS PAGE. Plus, every month, every lab, including ours, undergoes safety check done by safety department of KAIST. Thus, we believe there are no safety problems with researchers during our project. o Public safety Our project mainly deals with E. coli K-12 strain which has been assessed to be non-pathogenic by WHO. Thus, this bacterial strain cannot permanently colonize the colon of healthy humans or animals, not causing any serious diseases. In addition, both our projects need certain conditions to express desired function or metabolism. For example, our project to transform Wood-ljungdahl pathway into E. coli K-12 strain has been done in anaerobic chamber. In other words, once the bacterial strain is kept in anaerobic container or incubator, it will not cause any potential damage to the public and if the container leaks, the condition will turn into aerobic one which will stop the bacterial strain to run desired metabolism. Moreover, another project of ours deals with invertase gene which needs induction to initiate its function, thus we can tell that our projects are completely under our control. That’s why we believe there are no safety problems raised to the public due to our research. o Environmental safety? For environmental safety, every waste generated during experiments is disposed by following policies of KAIST. All solid wastes (lab gloves, pipette tips, petri dish, falcon tubes, culture tubes, EP tubes, lab tissues etc.) are collected in a designated container while liquid wastes such as reagents or culture media are exclusively collected in different container. In case of toxic reagents such as carcinogen, we prepared another container exclusively used for these reagents. In addition, damaging wastes (razor blades, syringe needles, broken parts of flasks etc.) are separately collected and disposed. Disposal of all these wastes are done every Friday by selected company. Hence, our project does not raise any environmental biosafety issues.