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Team:Heidelberg LSL/Notebook safety
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Revision as of 13:48, 15 June 2012
Laboratory Issues
Safety
In synthetic biology you work with bacteria, with life. So you have to take care in what you are doing. It is important to decide what is ethically correct when you work with this life. In synthetic biology you build bio machines which could be dangerous.
You also have to take safety precautions when you work in a laboratory. PD Dr. Rüdiger Arnold, a scientific coordinator and head of the Life-Science Laboratory, explained us how to work carefully and according to the biosafety level S1 requirements. In a safety introduction course he told us the most important precaution measures:
- You have to wear laboratory gloves, lab coats and sometimes protective goggles
- You have to wash your hands after working in a laboratory
- Contaminated areas have to be cleaned with 80% ethanol
- Do not eat or drink in a laboratory
- Autoclave contaminated materials before disposal
- Be sure to work according to the protocol
- Safety first - the highest priority is to save and protect the health and life of an individual working in a lab
Verification of Safety Instruction (pdf)
Security
All constructed parts we sent to the parts registry fulfill the biosafety level S1 requirements and are therefore non-hazardous and non-infectious for humans and harmless for the environment. We worked with well-characterized and endogenous promoters from the E. coli safety strain K12 in which we finally tested our parts also. The recA promoter (part BBa_J22106) has often been tested and has a Registry Star. We combined our promoters with well-described reporters. The Beta-galactosidase protein generator (part BBa_K173004) is well tested, too. Furthermore, we want to emphasize, that our project was set up in a charitable and non-profit way and users of our parts should share our intention, which is the shared intention of iGEM, the partsregistry and the synthetic biology community also.
Security considerations with our application of genetically modified bacteria in jewelry
Having genetically modified bacteria outside a laboratory is problematic. Some of the bacterial suspension could drop out of the small tube on the jewelry and get onto the skin or in the environment. Even though our bacterial strains are not able to survive outside their artificial environment in the laboratory in particular outside the optimal medium, they can become dangerous through mutations especially when being exposed to UV-radiation. Consequently, there is some genetical diversity which could enable the bacterium to survive, to spread in our environment or to even cause diseases. Also, the disposal of used tubes could be problematic but there could be found ways to be sure that no bacterium survived after the use of the tube.
