While working on our project we have considered biosafety to the most. The biosafety we have taken in our experiment are:
Our team started it with a complete understanding of biosafety and biosecurity training before starting the experiment. We started with good Laboratory practices and covered all topics listed by iGEM in the safety form. To run our experiment smoothly in the laboratory, we cleverly design our experiment so as to reduce the risk level and to gain some lab handling experience at the same time. We first selected the organisms and parts with less risk factor so that we can use them in the BSL-1 facility and tried using safer alternatives for our experiment. Like we use E.coli strain DH5 alpha for transformation with pET28b plasmid instead of any other harmful strain. We carried out every experiment in proper places like in laminar hood, open bench etc. as we learned from the biosafety training.
After getting Biosafety training and sharing our experimentation design, we got approval from our Institute’s Biosafety committee to proceed with our experiments. We maintained a proper record of lab activities in a notebook, received authorization for equipment, and followed lab protocol during experimentation.
While planning the project we considered biosafety and added some safety features to it:
Since aptamer based UTI detection is a new and more reliable technique because of its docking property to the whole cell or to a specific protein, it is in the limelight now-a-days. In our project we are using this docking property of aptamers to our advantage. Since, the detection process is going to be In Vitro, so it will not affect the human body at any cost.
Taking all the experimental steps into consideration, we can say that the aptamers that we get as a product are not harmful to the environment at all, since they are just random DNA and RNA sequences. But for safety purposes we can autoclave the disposable materials along with products like the pellets of the strains that we are using for transformation, aptamers that we get or that we reject can be disposed according to the biosafety guidelines.
This is supposed to be a detection kit which is designed to detect a particular disease, in our case it is Uropathogens to confirm UTI. Since our aim is to mass produce this kit and make it available in the rural areas, it does not need any professional handler, with a little training anyone can handle this.