Transitioning to a new lab this year meant we had to realign ourselves with safety procedures. For our project this year, we worked with bacteria and chose E. coli K-12 strains. These specific strains aren't native to the human digestive system, and do not fit in there or the environment. With us planning to use phage again this year, we identified phage lambda to work with, a BSL-1 level organism that only infects E. coli.
Beyond the biological materials we used, general lab safety still needed to be followed. We wore gloves all the time while performing any experiments and while carrying all samples and organisms. To ensure we cleaned up after ourselves, a 10% bleach solution and 70% ethanol solution were used on lab surfaces. Contamination was mitigated with autoclaves. Finally, when considering using phage in a bacteria oriented lab, we planned to clean lab surfaces a minimum of two times before finishing each day.