Team:GreatBay United/Safety
Safety
Prologue
This year, GreatBay_United is aiming to develop a complete, accurate, and rapid Artificial Limulus Amebocyte Lycate which can detect the endotoxin released by specific bacterial. Because ideally, we want to use the complete structure of LPS in Coxiella Burnetii to construct the detection system of our experimental design, GBU has been making necessary contacts with the Safety Department of iGEM beforehand. What’s more, GBU has submitted a check-in form to ensure that it’s safe to carry on our lab experiments.
Laboratory preparation
Our lab belongs to Biosafety Level 1 which follows the basic safety procedures, called Standard Microbiological Practices, and requires no special equipment or design features. Every team in our lab has an independent experimental console that we carry out our regular experiments. For operations such as agarose gel electrophoresis, we will operate it on the console by the window where dangerous and corrosive reagents can be stored and treated well. Before entering the lab, each member from GBU has received a printed laboratory notebook that covers all standard molecular experiment protocols as the guideline for our team members to follow in the lab and during the experiment.
What’s more, members of GBU all received proper training before participating in Wetlab work.
Biosafety & Organisms
At this stage, it is determined that the bacteria used are Qfever pathogenic Coxiella burnetii, and the allestoric protein required by the detection system has been sent for synthesis. Regarding the use of antigens, we hope to use the entire LPS as an antigen for detection. Since the Coxiella Burnetii belongs to Risk Group 3, the use of antigens has been discussed with the iGEM Safety Department by email and check-in-form.
Organisms that GBU is using are listed in follow:
- Antigen: Coxiella burnetii
- Antibody: huscFv1E4
- Vaccine: The 1E4 binding to synthetic mimic peptide
- Medium and expression system : Bacillus subtilis
- PSA protease
- TVMV protease
- HCV protease
- Spy protein scaffolds
- Yeast
Project Safety
- Eating by mistake can cause discomfort.
- Leakage of bacteria may cause environmental genetic pollution.
Professional Help on Safety
We do have our instructors in charge of safety issues in the lab, on both rules of the lab and the parts we use in the experiment. Regulations on what we can and what shouldn't be done were taught on the first day when we entered the lab. They also kept up with our planning and designing of the project. Reports on what parts and organisms were used were held every week to discuss potential risks that exist and they do give very formal and specific answers to our questions. We believe in our excellent instructor Mia Zhang, who can help us if there is any risk.
