Introduction

Safety is one of the most important issues within research and experiments. Especially for us, whose project is engineering Influenza, safety becomes even more important since it’s something that really might affect our health. Thus, we conduct a system of lab safety-experiment safety-biological safety-education safety. On this page, we will discuss the safety measures we took to minimize the possible hazards in our project.

Lab safety

Lab safety refers to the safety of the space where we do experiments. Our wet lab experiment consists of 2 periods: plasmid construction and virus packaging & testing.

When we were doing plasmid constructing, we did it at the BSL-1 bench. We have open benches, biosafety cabinets, and chemical fumes hood in this area to help us accomplish our work. Here are some pictures of this area:

When it comes to virus packaging and testing, the BSL-2 space is needed, though WSN belongs to the BSL-1 category in China, engineering of WSN is recommended to be done in the BSL-2 lab. The process of consideration is shown in Human Practice Sep 4th. The experimental environment is shown below:

Experiment Safety

Experiment Safety refers to the safety rules of experiment for researchers. Before doing wet lab experiment, we had training in lab safety according to the regulations of our school. Also, we identified the possible hazards that might happen with the help of Professor Xiang, and it can be seen in Human Practice 4th and our project safety form. In all, we think that we minimized the risk that might happen to us while experimenting.

Biological safety

Biological Safety refers to the safety of the biological materials we use. Except for Influenza, all the materials we use, including Trans 1-T1, A549 cell line, 293T cell line, CHO cell line, are all from the iGEM White List.

Influenza

We have successfully submitted the Check-In form before usage. A/WSN/33(H1N1) is what we use for engineering, and it belongs to BSL-1. As for the stalk area we use, we didn’t extract the gene from other viruses. Instead, we obtained the gene segments from gene synthesis, which significantly reduces any potential risks.

Usages

1.E. coli strain Trans 1-T1: construct plasmids
2.293T: culture and package Influenza
3.A549 cell line & CHO cell line: test Influenza
4.A/WSN/33(H1N1): Influenza which we engineer

Education Safety

Education Safety refers to the safety in our activity of education. We organized an activity for freshmen to learn and experience synthetic biology, through both giving a lecture and doing molecular cloning experiments.

To ensure the safety of the experimental experience, we took several measures as follows:

1.Lecture about Laboratory safety
2.Detailed explanation of each procedure of the experiment
3.Demanded a preview of the experiment in advance and laboratory report writing
4.Instructions for experiments operation of each step before really doing the experiments
5.Careful Supervision of the experimenting process

Under these measures, the activity was held successfully.

Result

In summary, no hazards have occurred this year, and we believe our safety controls have effectively protected us from potential risks.