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Team:HKU HongKong/Safety.html
From 2012.igem.org
Team:HKU HK
From 2011.igem.org
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 safety talk and laboratory inspection, which rise awareness of any potential dangers in the lab to our team members. The Department of Biochemistry has provided and maintained a safe environment, in compliance with the Occupational Safety and Health Regulations for every team member.
1. Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of:
a) Researcher safety
No as we have series of measure to team members. Laboratory inspection along with a safety talk held by safety chief is required, which strengthen the awareness of laboratory safety. Moreover, information pamphlets on safety issue have been distributed to all of our team members as a guide. Nevertheless, supervision from advisor is required in the department. This provides better protection towards our team members.
Before using new chemicals or bacterial stain in lab, Material Safety Data Sheet or Biosafety Level of particular stain was checked to ensure if there are any potential dangers to researcher.
b) Public safety
In general, we will be using E.coli strain 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 Biosafety Level 1. For isolation of pvdQ, genomic DNA of P. aerugonosa strain Boston 41501 is used, in which it belongs to Biosafety Level 1, instead of extracted from P. aerugonosa, which is Biosafety Level 2.
http://www.atcc.org/ATCCAdvancedCatalogSearch/ProductDetails/tabid/452/Default.aspx?ATCCNum=27853&Template=bacteria
