Team:BNU-China/safety-overview

Overview

Safety, including lab and environment safety, is always our top concern.

In lab, all members have received safety trainings before working on our project; experiment regulations are rigidly observed.
In regard of environment, we have evaluated the project feasibility and its relating security issues. We designed a kill switch to guarantee our “Prometheus” is under control while capturing Molybdenum and delivering it to roots of grass family.

The details are as follows, including lab safety, environmental safety and the design of the kill switch.

The safety questions:

1.Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues?

Escherichia coli, stem DH5 alpha and TOP10 are used in our lab work. All the strains are safe and commonly used. All living material and material derived from living organism are treated as potentially infectious materials and we never release them into the environment without sterilisation. Work in the lab is only permitted for students wearing a lab coat, long trousers and closed shoes. For certain kinds of work with increased safety, danger safety glasses and appropriate protection gloves have to be used. Of course eating and drinking is strictly forbidden.

2.Do any of the new BioBrick parts (or devices) that you made this year raise safety issues?

All of the biobricks we will establish are safe and none of them expresses toxic gene products. There is no expectable safety problem with these gene materials.

3. Is there a local biosafety group, committee, or review board at your institution?

Professor Wang Yue, a famous health law expert in China from Peking University Health Science Center, is our team advisor. We consulted him about the related law issues to ensure that all the experiments are conducted under the law in China. Besides, the teacher, who takes charge of lab safety in Beijing Normal University, taught us how to deal with the laboratory waste and gave us a lot of valuable advice.

The Story of E.coli Prometheus

BNU-China