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Team:Heidelberg LSL/Notebook safety
From 2012hs.igem.org
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 harmless for humans and the environment. We worked with well-characterized and endogenous promoters from the E. coli safety strain K12 in which we finally testet 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.
