Safety

Laboratory Safety

  • Tie back long hair and wear suitable gloves, lab coat, goggles, and other personal protective equipment
  • Avoid touching eyes and mouth while conducting experiments
  • Do not eat or drink in the lab, never taste chemicals
  • Turn off all heating appliances when not in use. Keep flammable objects away from the workspace.
  • Carefully dispose of anything that breaks.
  • After completing the experiments, carefully clean the workbench and use ddH2O to clean the equipment
  • Follow the director’s instructions for equipment operation
  • Do not run or play inside the lab

Material Safety

The agents we used are all IGEM compliant, non-toxic and unharmful. The experiment we conducted was combining the VP7 vaccine and the VP1 vaccine into a bivalent vaccine. As an oral vaccine, it must be safe for infants to take orally and without any endotoxin. Furthermore, we used materials including enzymes, plasmid, and E. coli, which are all safe and low risk during experiments. If we performed the bacteria experiments, we must stay on the sterile ultra-clean table to avoid contamination, and the microbes were disposed of in the waste water bucket. Therefore, we always need to sterilize our hands, and the workspace before experimenting. Most importantly, we never use any animal or human genes in our experiments.