Safety

Aiming to construct a safe and creative lab environment.

1.1 Biosafety

   1.1.1 Key words

Biosafety is used to describe efforts to reduce and eliminate the potential risks resulting from biotechnology and its products. It has similarly been defined as “the avoidance of risk to human health and safety, and to the conservation of the environment, as a result of the use for research and commerce of infectious or genetically modified organisms” (Zaid, 2001).

   1.1.2 Researcher safety

It is impossible to work in a laboratory environment without its risks, so we took a variety of steps to make sure the safety of our team during our lab work. All our team members are students in the school of life sciences and are well trained through teaching and lab rotations. Protective measures involve gloves, masks and lab coats. The labs we use are equipped with safety facilities, so researcher safety is guaranteed.

   1.1.3 Public safety

We just use the common competent cells: BL21 ,DH5αwhich we gain them from invetrogen and HB101 strain from the military medicine research institution in china, all of them are harmless to the public. National standards link:

http://www.cnca.gov.cn/cnca/zwxx/xwdt/zxtz/images/20080310/3873.pdf

Also, the plasmids and DNA fragments that we use are mostly provided by iGEM. Furthermore, all the stuff will be autoclaved sterilization before we discard them. None of these parts involves direct interaction with the public, so there is little risk to public safety from our project.

   1.1.4 Environment safety

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. Plus, all plates will be boiled thoroughly to kill the bacteria before disposal. So, our project does not pose a risk to environmental safety.

1.2 Laboratory biosafety

    Health risks and personal safety

Working in the lab always has implicit risks, but we have taken action to minimize them. Everyone engages in the experiment must wear biohazard gloves and mouth-muffles, on one hand to protect themselves, on other hand to prevent the unnecessary enzymes. Before leaving the laboratory, the instructors will guide us to check all the experimental facilities including sterile the various containers, take off the water bath and other risky facilities. We also be required to washing our hands with the disinfectant to ensure the personal safety.

1.3 BioBrick safety

Our project consider about exploiting new methods to deal with the antibiotic issues, the biobrick safety matters that we may involved in is that we construct a plasmid with the conjugation function in order to spread our target DNA fragment. For the sake of preventing the plasmid broadcast some unknown function genes, we ensure that every used liquid medium and gel solid medium are sterile before disposal. Well, all the other DNA fragments no matter we used or modified are achieved from the kit plates or commonly employed in laboratory.

1.4 Local biosafety group\committee

In China, the main concerns for biosafety are pathogenic microbes and the genetically modified crops. Our experiment is designed and carried out following the standards of national biosafety office, therefore no laws or regulations regarding the biosafety issue are violated.

http://www.cnca.gov.cn/cnca/zwxx/xwdt/zxtz/images/20080310/3873.pdf

The laboratory that we worked in is the State Key Laboratory of Bioelectronics which has a serious biosafety constitution. And all new experiments would be weighed on safety by experienced teachers before execution.

In addition, we have meticulously refer to the rules made by Experiment Center of Biomaterial and Biotechnology. For further information of this set of rules, please visit the website:

http:www.lmbe.seu.edu.cn/cailiao/guizhangzhidu.html