Overview

    CPU_Nanjing has a profound understanding of the inherent risks while working in labs. Based on this, we consistently take all necessary precautions to ensure the safety of our team members and the environment. We have implemented the following safety procedures. Our full safety form can be found at the link at the bottom of this page.

General In-lab Safety

Personal Protection

    As the basic requirement, all team members have to participate and pass the test on Laboratory Safety that organized by our school. For everyone who enter our lab, rules about clothes are strictly enforced with no exception. Every member of our team shall wear lab coats and enclosed leather shoes before entering the lab, with long hair tied back and all jewelry taken off. Gloves and safety glasses shall be worn while using corrosives, acids, bases, alcohols and other situations necessary. Slippers, shorts, skirts and dresses are strictly prohibited to exist inside our lab at all times. All team members have been taught about the locations of emergency exits and first-aid service.

Apparatus and Chemicals

    In order to protect ourselves and the environment, all the usages of apparatus and chemicals should obey the basic rules of our lab. Obsolete and unsafe equipment are prohibited to be used. Chemicals shall be utilized or stored in places with adequate protection such as fume hood, flammables cabinet, and general chemical store cabinet if necessary.

Waste Disposal

    The location of biological safety hazard waste containers, sharps disposal containers, autoclaving methods, and spills kits location/contents.

Emergency Facilities

    Though we never want emergency situation to happen inside our lab, it is vital for us to configure facilities to tackle any potential danger including emergency showers, eye-washers, fire blankets, extinguishers, and emergency buttons. All facilities shall receive periodic checks to test their feasibility.

Project Specific Lab Safety

The Strains Utilized in our lab

    Our project utilizes 3 different strains this year: Escherichia coli DH5-alpha, Escherichia coli K-12 and Microcystis aeruginosa FACHB-469. We are interested in a phosphite dehydrogenase expressed in E. coli. We have found the corresponding sequence in published paper and will have it synthesized by a commercial provider. Lysate of wildtype Microcystis aeruginosa FACHB-469 will serve as the nutrition source of this biological oxidation process and orthophosphate assay will be performed to determine the oxidation efficiency.

    The biosafety level of the above strains is level 1 (i.e., safe) according to relevant product sheets from ATCC. In our wet laboratory, all upstream genetic engineering operations such as transformation, vector expression and protein measurement are carried out in strict accordance with regulations and supervised by our instructor and PI.

    Even though organisms used in our experiments are all nonpathogens, inoculation of E. coli and M. aeruginosa must be conducted within biosafety cabinets and a thorough sterilization must be done using high-pressure autoclaves before culture disposal. Meanwhile, genetically engineered E. coli and wildtype M. aeruginosa applied to the phosphite oxidation reactors has to be collected at the end of the processes and subjected to sterilization. Reactors and their accessories that are exposed to engineered E. coli and wildtype M. aeruginosa also need to be disinfected by chemical disinfectant.

Risk Management

    Apart from our supervisor, experienced and professional staffs working in China Pharmaceutical University will support us to manage risks that may occur in biology labs. Meanwhile, all the experiments will be conducted under the supervisions of these staffs and our secondary PI, who has expertise with experimental procedures and biological waste disposal. Once risks emerge in our project, we can go to them for assistance. We promise that the biosafety rules issued by our university and the laboratory biosafety guidelines established by WHO will be stringently complied.

Training and Enforcement

Training

    All members of our team have received basic lab safety training during our study in university lab courses. In addition, our instructors spend one week to ensure that we have obtained enough theoretical knowledge. Moreover, Wang Xin, the second PI with numerous experiences of leading an iGEM team, taught us a series of experiments to make sure that we get plenty of practical experience. There are three valuable suggestions:

    Apparatus: There should be adequate experimental devices that function normally, using any possible resource to remove the barriers as many as we can.
    Members: All members participating in experiments should be trained strictly based on their responsibilities.
    Software: Integral regulating systems should be set up first.

    The above guidelines are supplementary to each other, assisting us to achieve two fundamental goals related to the safety during the whole project:

    Make sure that all members performing experiments will not be infected.
    Make sure that the environment will not be polluted due to our experiments.

Enforcement

    It is without doubt that every member of our team fully respects each other. However, in order to make our project safer, enforcement is still necessary to be applied as a constraint for team members to follow the rules working inside our lab.

    Team members violating safety rules are required to do lab work under the supervision of the experiment staff for the rest of the week, or until the safety officer believes the member is capable of performing the task unsupervised. For multiple infractions or complete disregard to safety protocols, a member may be restricted from laboratory work immediately until he/she receives retraining again, and demonstrates proper performance to a team leader.

    Though completed and passed by all team members, we sincerely wish that our rules of enforcement will never have the opportunity to be used during our iGEM journey.