Safety

Safety Training

Safety is an important aspect of the iGEM project requirements, and we understand and respect that. As a software team, we do no work in any wet lab capacity, but just as safety training teaches best practices and behaviours in lab, we have used our safety training to employ best practices and behaviours in developing software. We have covered topics including but not limited to: using GitHub, commenting/documenting code, and how to abstract/re-factor code.

We did not use formal lab safety materials as we did not work in any lab at all.

Who is responsible for biological safety at our institution?

Department of Environment, Health & Safety at UCSD. The project has not been discussed with the department as we anticipate no safety hazards. You can find the biosafety guidelines of our institution here.

Also, these are the regulations that govern biosafety in general in research laboratories in the United States: http://sis.nlm.nih.gov/enviro/labsafety.html

Risks of our projects in the future

As we are only developing software and not interacting at all with any biological components, we anticipate no new risks to arise. It must be noted, though, that we take no responsibility for any kind of work in any lab resulting from our work. Hence, any lab that wishes to use SBiDER for their own research purposes must, at all times, keep the biosafety regulations of their own institution and country in mind.