Team:THIS-China/Safety

Overview

Every biological lab group must pay close attention to safety. In order to avoid such safety issues while conducting our experimentation, we have done pre-lab equipment learning to avoid misusing the experimental apparatus, prepared and carefully chosen the organisms we use, and careful protection in the lab.

Organism and Parts

Because our lab is a S2 risk level lab, the organisms we used were all level 1 organisms, which means that they are highly safe to use during experiments and do not pose a risk to humans and the environment. Throughout the experiment, we used E.coli DH5a strain, E.coli BL21 strain, and Bacillus Subtilis strain 168 (although we decided to not use it in our final experiment). All of these strains are harmless, even if some of them are accidently taken out. We decide not to use S.mutans, even though it is the organism that gives out the signal that activates our system, because it is a level 2 organism and thus has the potential of harming the environment. So, for safety reasons, we have used synthesized CSP for testing the induction of our whole system.

The parts that we used are all safe because previous iGEM team have used these parts in their experiment before, including SZPT-China, CCU-Taiwan, SHSBNU-China, and Worldshaper-XSHS. Therefore, the safety level for the parts and proteins are also very high.

Pre-Lab Teaching

All the team members received training prior to the experimentation. Before we started, our secondary instructor Wang Xuan, who is a previous iGEM participant and has been an advisor for several years, gave us multiple lectures about things needed be careful in the lab, lab rules, and introduced to us the various equipment used by our experiment. For example, we have stressed the importance of wearing plastic gloves when using the gel electrophoresis and checking the plugging of the apparatus and the bubbles flowing in the buffer. We have also gone in-depth about rules that must be followed when using the experimentation tools. In addition, we have strict rules for wearing lab coats, gloves, and masks in the lab to minimize safety issues. Finally, we also demonstrate how to use various apparatus under the watch of the lab assistant and advisor to show that we know how to properly use all of the lab equipment.

Lab Time Protection

We have used the lab in the Tsinghua University campus, which is a proper university-level S2 risk level lab. In the lab, a lab assistant closely supervises our group members and reminds us of safety issues. Therefore, our experiment is done under safe circumstances.

Prevention of Leakage For Our Product

We have designed a hardware product for ensuring the safety of our product, which contains genetically engineered E.coli. We completely eliminate the possibility of external objects coming into contact with the engineered E.coli by placing the cells behind a semipermeable membrane. The semipermeable membrane is big enough to let in the signal peptide CSP from the patient’s mouth rinses, but is also small enough to prevent the bacteria from passing through, including both entering and exiting. Therefore, our hardware not only ensures that the engineered substances does not get in touch with the outside world, it also prevents other bacteria in the mouth rinse from entering and contaminating the engineered E.coli.