General Lab safety

Wear gloves and lab coats

Wear shoes with close ends

No eating, drinking or running in Lab

Tie up long hair

Dispose biological wastes in specific bins

Carry our experiments with poisonous or pungent gases in a fume cupboard

Clean up the lab before leaving

Experimental safety

Operation of the clean bench/biosafety cabinet

Sterilize the cabinet by opening UV light before usage for 30 min

Do not stare directly at the UV light

Open laminar airflow before usage

Sterilize all apparatus over the alcohol burner before using them

All caps and lids should be placed with their bottoms up, and sterilized above the flame before usage

Spray alcohol and scrub hands

Operation using a pipette

The non-disposable part of the pipette shouldn’t be in contact with any reagents to prevent contamination

Operations using Alcian blue dye

Carry out all procedures in a fume cupboard

Operations regarding gel electrophoresis

Wear gloves as the gel is poisonous

Micro-organism safety

The bacteria our team only uses in the experiment is E. coli DH5α, a non-pathogenic strain of microorganisms. This is the most commonly used strain in genetic engineering. We cultured bacteria of E. coli DH5α strain in a laminar flow clean bench throughout the whole process of gene cloning. Additionally, in consideration of the environmental and ecological issues, all substances contaminated by E. coli DH5α will be sterilized before disposal and will be discarded in the biohazardous bin. In addition, we also used the ATDC5 cell line to construct the skeletal cell model for evaluation experiments and the relevant experiments were conducted inside the biosafety cabinet and the cell room under the supervision of our instructors.

All enzymes and genetic materials (including pCMV-3Tag-1A, RNAi-Ready pSIREN-RetroQ, EcoRI, XhoI, BamHI, T4 ligase and so on) present minimal hazards to the environment and human health. All lab apparatus was sterilized or cleaned before use.

Ethics

Our experiments don’t involve any human or animal. And all genetic modifications that were established in our process are limited to research purposes.