Safety
Working with genetically engineered organisms and potentially hazardous chemicals makes safety vital to protect our team from accidents and our work from contamination. All of our work is classified as Biosafety Level 1 (S1), as we don't handle any high-risk biological materials, but we have implemented a number of safety measures that we would like to share with you.
Laboratory Work
All team members, and students that visited our lab received compulsory safety training by our PI before working in the laboratory. This training included the following topics:
Rooms & Persons
Rules for Working Safely
Organisms in the lab
S1-Related Documentation
Autoclaving
Clean Bench
Centrifugation
Emergency Situations
This training taught us how to handle genetically modified organisms and how to protect ourselves and our work. We all wear fully buttoned labcoats and safety glasses with UV-protection any time we enter a S1 laboratory and when needed in other rooms as well.
We keep a safety checklist on the door of our laboratory in German and in English. We learned the proper way to handle the lab equipment and any hazardous chemicals and their disposal. For instance, because we use EtBr in gel electrophoresis, we have a designated electrophoresis room.
Project Design
All the work we do is covered by the White List. The constructs we designed are non-hazardous. For more information on our constructs and project design, have a look at our project description. We used various non-pathogenic E. coli strains for our experiments, which are all categorized as biosafety level 1 and therefore pose minimal potential hazard.
Sterile work in the laboratory was achieved by proper sterilization of our work spaces, bunsen burners and a clean bench. We protected our work by always working with nitrile gloves that we disinfected before handling our bacteria.
Any S1 waste was autoclaved to ensure that no genetically modified organisms are released into the environment. We also conducted our experiments in a cell-free system because our final product would need to be suitable and safe for the consumer to use at home.
Documentation
We are obligated to document any S1 work that we conduct. We keep an online lab journal and various documentation documents, so that everything can be retraced. They will be kept for as long as the guidelines intend.
Strain documentation
Plasmid documentation
Primer documentation
We have a list, where team members confirm that all their S1 work is documented on a weekly basis. And if someone forgot to confirm they had to bring a cake. So you could say that the documentation worked very well.
