While designing our project and deciding upon which biological infrastructure we will perform our experiments, one of the most important themes that were standing before our eyes was the safety of the project: even though it was rather appealing from a biological perspective to work with a Zika virus in order to gain our proof of concept (being considered while we had to choose a trigger to be used throughout our experiments), we have rejected it immediately and have decided to use a much safer, even though more traditional, chassis.
Following the very well defined and clear security guidelines of Tel-Aviv University, every action performed in the lab was planned to take action by at least two members of the group, wearing a lab coat, gloves, eye masks (in case it was needed) and any other required safety equipment. Following a detailed safety training given by the group's tutor, Matan Arbel (a PhD candidate at George S. Wise Faculty of Life Science, Tel-Aviv University, and a past participant of iGEM 2020 competition), the principles of safe lab work have been deeply understood.
While working in the lab, we took harsh cautions in order to verify the group members' safety: for example, we have prepared an electrophoresis gel only within a chemical hood, and checked it after loading and running using a blue light instead of a UV light. Not only that, but while working with bacterial agents throughout our parts improvement experiments, cautions have to be taken in order to verify that biological waste will be dispensed only where it belongs, therefore we have set up the system in a way that enables a suitable dispense of the debris and the trash.
Since so, the ways by which our project was designed were influenced much by the possible consequences of unsafe actions: while working with biological components given kindly to us by others, such as plasmids, they were immediately sequenced in order to verify their intact and safe nature; while working with tissue cultures, extra cautions were taken in order to prevent an unwanted contamination that might affect also the ones taking care of the culture; When there was a need to slice off a DNA fragment out of an electrophoresis gel, the group member which was the one to perform the slicing act was accompanied by at least another one member of the group; and so forth.
When performing wet lab experiments, we used the following safety equipment: