Team:Shanghai Metro Utd/Safety
SAFETY
General Safety Training
Our team is very careful and responsible for each and every experiment we do in the
lab throughout the process. Before the experiments, we were trained to be aware clearly of all the
information about the specific experiment and wear lab gowns, gloves, and masks in the laboratory to avoid
skin as well as eye contact with all chemicals. When we use any materials with health risk, we have a mentor
or our lab instructor to supervise the whole process. The culture cabinets and other equipment we use are
sterile and can guarantee the safety of the reagents and the safety of the users. We were asked to wear
high-temperature gloves when working with warming agents. And we can't eat any food and drink any beverage
in the lab. During the experiments, we will make sure to change the pipet tips whenever necessary, use clean
spoons, and place emphasis on safety and chemical hygiene at all times. After the experiments, our used
waste liquid and other waste reagents were thrown into the designated waste tank. In the meantime, we will
place everything back to its original place and avoid all chemical exposures prior to leaving the
laboratory. Of course, we also carefully sorted our experimental notes of the day for review and records for
the wiki use.
There was a situation that we were making the agarose gel, one of us used a used
spoon so that we had to dispose of the whole gel to guarantee no contamination. Whenever this type of
incident happened, we will be always cooperative and rigorous.
Microorganism Safety
Recipient cells are also called host cells. The recipient cells are prokaryotic
receptor cells (mostly E. coli), eukaryotic receptor cells (mostly yeast), animal cells, and insect cells
(actually eukaryotic receptor cells). Among the prokaryotic receptor cells, the most commonly used host cell
is Escherichia coli, as we used in our project, which was considered with little harm to human bodies. But
be on the safe side, whenever we transferred or cultivated E. coli, we ensured no exposure to the
environments unless inside the super clean bench and all related experiments were conducted under
supervision of our lab instructor. When cultivating E. coli, we added antibiotics to the culture medium and
placed them in a sterile incubator.