Team:Queens Canada/Safety
Safety
Overview
Since the beginning of the project, the team was aware of the large number of safety risks associated with working with Lyme disease. Although the team never worked with live Borrelia Burgdorferi, the team followed similar risk precautions.
Training
The first risk assessed was physically being in the lab. All of our teammates present in the lab had previously taken lab classes, however, they had never worked in a biochemistry lab. The training started with our primary investigator (PI) giving us a tour of the lab. The floor safety officer then gave us an in-depth look at the lab's various safety features such as the eyewash stations, the fire extinguishers, and more.
The next step forward was to learn how to utilize the different equipment in the lab. The team's Wet Lab Coordinator, Griffin was then selected to receive training to handle the autoclave. The remainder of the training was handled by the graduate students who generously volunteered their time to help our team. The graduate students helped our team learn all the procedures related to recombinant protein expression and cloning by advising us and supervising us for the first few weeks.
Organisms
Escherichia coli (E.coli) is a bacterium commonly used for cloning and protein expression but is also known to be capable of infecting humans and cause symptoms such as diarrhea, vomiting, stomach pains, etc. The team utilized this bacteria and fortunately, the lab strains of E. coli (E. coli TOP10 and BL21(DE3)) had very limited survival in the environment and were not harmful or pathogenic to the team. Regardless, when working with E. coli our team always wore proper personal protective equipment (PPE) including lab coats, gloves, long pants, and close toes shoes.
In the early stages of the project, the team was unsure if we would need to work with live Borrelia Burgdorferi (BB). As a precaution, we investigated the necessary training, safety equipment, and PPE that the team would need to acquire. We quickly discovered that we would need items such as a biosafety cabinet and biosafety level 2 lab space. We discussed further with a lab at Queen's which supplied BB and determined we could use heat-killed BB as an alternative as it is a biosafety level 1 hazard if we ended up needing to work with the bacterium. At the end of the day, we determined that for an adequate test, we could use recombinantly expressed outer surface proteins of BB to verify our testing assay. Even though it was a much more grueling process to obtain, it is much safer. Although safer, surface proteins must still be handled carefully as some of these proteins are responsible for colonizing within various organisms and proper PPE must be worn at all times as well as caution used when handling.
Hazardous Chemicals
There weren't many chemicals associated with cloning and protein expression that are overly harmful. Any harmful chemicals present were carefully labeled as well as were pointed out to us by the graduate students during our training.