Team:NUDT CHINA/Safety

Safety

Organisms and Parts

Organisms

This year, we used different species of E.coli in our project. Different Genotype provided us different choices when planning our experiment. Based on our project, following 4 species of E.coli was used in our project. All of these species are common and widely used in the field of molecular clone.

Parts

Our parts are all assembled with materials from the distribution or synthesized based on known sequence. For more detaile, please read the ’’part’’ section of our wiki.

Institutional Rules and Regulations

The NUDT's Commission for Construction of Biological Sciences is responsible for bio-security in our institution. We have discussed the project with the teachers of this commission, and gotten their approval. Three extra teachers led by the deputy chief of DCB(the Department of Chemistry and Biology) were designated to provide us assistance if necessary and monitor us on our implementation on the lab bio-safety protocols at the same time.

Training

All team members were required to attend safety training focused on:

• General biosafety principles.
• The proper use of containment equipment (Biological safety (laminar flow) cabinets and delimited working space when required) as well as personal protective equipment (PPE) (White coat and gloves).
• Risk assessment of experiments involving: Recombinant DNA, ethidium bromide, other bio hazardous materials.
• Proper Biological waste disposal.

Lab security

toxic chemical reagents EB

Ethidium Bromide (EB) is a very toxic agent. However, because it’s high efficiency and low cost, our lab still use this molecule as nucleic acid staining molecule. To prevent it from hurting us, our lab requires everyone in the electrophoresis Rome to wear a second pair of gloves. Also, Wasted gel were collected and properly disposed.

Human Practices

Android Game

This year we launched an Android game based on the classic game golden miner. The game was set on the expansion of the Ebola virus which aims to explain the basic principle and methods of the synthetic biology to the public. In each section, players are required to collect specific numbers of nucleotides to meet the need of synthetizing a new part (from a promoter to a CDS) and finally they combine them to be a device. This game was uploaded onto the Internet so everyone can download it and learn something about it. The download link is [http://pan.baidu.com/s/1i3xd9fj]. It’s still a Chinese version so far. But the English version is coming.

Bio lab security survey

Recently we did the bio lab security survey in 12 universities and institutions (none of which were iGEM participants). Abundant statistic ensured the reliability of the conclusion followed.

More than 200 people (248 to be exact) participate this research. According to the result, we have to confront a big problem that the security are not focused on as it should have been in China.

As is shown by the result, on the field of implementation of lab-security policies, half of the respondents have never got a security training before they actually entered the lab, more than half of the respondents had no idea about the safety level of their own lab. On the field of personal experiment habit, more than 60percent of the respondents cannot tell the correct order to undress the protections, which implies the big safety problem.

But we believe that with the development of the bio-technique and bio-awareness, people will pay more and more attention to the security aspect. As we can see, the bio security issues call for the global attention.

Meet up

iGEM encourages communication and mutual assistance between teams. And the science should not be made behind the doors. We attended the meet up held by Huazhong Agricultural University on 23rd and 24th August, 2014.

The Central China iGEMers’ Consortium(CCiC) invited Zhang Haoqian of PKU and Liu Yang of OUC, two accomplished former iGEM leaders to share their experiences with us and give their suggestions. Which exactly widen our thought. Jerry made a presentation to shared our projects at hand and team management either. This meet up was succeed and beneficial. And we believe that each team got something in return from the communication.

Teach-ins

On Oct. 15th, 2014. Jerry Qiu, the originator of the team NUDT-iGEM went to the Medical college of The Centralsouth university to make a promotion of his attractive and adorable experience with iGEM.

The communication meeting began at 8:00 p.m. Nearly a half hundred undergraduates attended this meeting. Firstly, Jerry made an introduction of iGEM and its idea. Then he shared our design and lab experience with them. Humorous words and graceful behaviors let Jerry get a band of new fans, who began to getting interested in iGEM!

With thunderous applause Jerry ended the speech at about 9:30 p.m. This meeting expanded the influence of the iGEM and help some people renew the conception of synthetic biology.