Introduction
As the laboratory is the starting point for all science and the space where researchers' passion unfolds, safety is invaluable. Laboratory safety is also a matter of direct relevance to our lives. This document describes the safety and security of your project. Safety describes containment principles, techniques, and practices implemented to prevent the unintended or accidental release of pathogens and toxins. In addition, safety is a way to protect yourself and others to avoid harmful accidents. Therefore, we must understand step-by-step cell culture and biological experiments such as transduction for intracellular protein overexpression that we want to program with SynBioBot and strive for safety.
Lab Safety
Access to the laboratory
Our team is made up of people from various backgrounds, including life sciences, mechanical engineering, chemistry, computer engineering, and pharmacology. Therefore, not everyone knows exactly about laboratory safety. However, safety is fundamental to all projects. Our team values safety above all else, and for this reason, we have taken lab safety training provided by schools, and carefully read safety management and safety rules for university chemistry labs. The laboratory safety training includes establishing a laboratory safety environment system, protective equipment to be equipped for research activities, risk of using smart devices during research activities, action tips in case of emergency patients, mechanical safety, electrical safety, and proper disposal of waste. In addition to this, We were able to take a step further toward safety by learning from the instructor what we should be careful about in the actual experimental environment that we could not learn with safety education.
Certification of Completion for Lab Safety Training
Strains
We use HaCaT, HDF, 293T cells are used for test the ability of SynBioBot in conducting cell culture in general. Further, with the robotic arm, we succeeded to infect those mammalian cells with recombinant lentivirus that we purchased from a company to overexpress alpha 5 and beta 1 integrin protein. All the cells that we used are considered in biosafety level 1 and the lentivirus cannot infect other cells.
Our project
Wet Lab
Microbial contamination is an important issue in cell culture. Bacteria, mycoplasma, yeast, and fungal spores can be contaminated by various factors such as workers, environment, workstation surfaces, and liquids such as medium. To prevent the spread of contamination, culture cells were frequently observed with a microscope and the naked eye, culture media and reagents were checked aseptic before use, and culture containers were not shared among the cell lines. In particular, contamination by mycoplasma is not observed under a microscope and spreads well around it, so if the pattern of cell proliferation is abnormal, a mycoplasma test should be performed.
Cell culture workstations were always kept clean, and cell culture and animal and microbial culture were carried out in different areas. Before working, we always washed our hands with a cleaning solution, used the surface of the workbench clean, and wiped it with 70% ethanol from time to time. When using culture containers or other laboratory glassware, they must be cleaned with 70% ethanol. Only the equipment necessary for the work is well organized so that the internal airflow is not disturbed. Commercialized reagents and medium were manufactured and guaranteed aseptic by the manufacturer, but ethanol was disinfected in consideration of the possibility of contamination on the surface.
Robot
The Sogang_Korea team had to solve the safety issues accordingly while proceeding with cell culture through SynBioBot. The robots can replace simple repetitive and dangerous tasks. And it solved our safety-related problems, but we still had to consider the minimum safety related to robots.
The following explanations show how we control the SynBiobot to conduct safe and reproducible experiments so that we could successfully apply it to education and automation.
Ethics in Our Project
With the advent of technologies such as gene recombination, cell fusion, artificial insemination, and cloning, many attempts have been made to ethically analyze the link between life and science, which is an essential part of science. In other words, there should be no science without ethics. Therefore, ethics is vital in preparing for and hosting the iGEM competition. We tried to prepare for the competition of keeping bioethics and research ethics by reading and understanding the ‘BIOETHICS AND SAFETY ACT’ statutes of the Korea Institute of Legal Studies.
