Safety
Safety Overview
Ensuring laboratory safety is vital for protecting the health and well-being of everyone who works in the laboratory. With this in mind, our team ensured to adhere strictly to Good Laboratory practices (GLP) and safety protocols.
Safety Design
As our project focused on infectious disease, i.e. creating a therapeutics against infectious pathogens, we knew that using pathogenic strains as first timers wouldn’t be a great idea. For this reason, we worked with safe and non-pathogenic strains throughout our experiments.
We chose Escherichia coli DH5_ for the heterologous expression of our antimicrobial peptide as it is considered safe and generally non-pathogenic.
To test the antimicrobial activity of our AMP, we used the non-pathogenic strain Staphylococcus aureus ATCC 12600, a strain commonly used for research and teaching purpose.
Putting the fact that our gene of interest (AMP gene) would be optianed from the genome sequence of Brevibacillus borstelensis AK1 into consideration, We ensured we submitted a check-in form for this strain as it was not included on the whitelist. We waited for approval form iGEM safety committee before proceeding with our experiment.
Lab Safety
Safety Training
Before starting our project, we had a laboratory safety training section organized by our advisor Ms. Nawal Alshahrany and the laboratory technician Mr Deepak Anand Brij. We were trained on the following topics:
This was done to ensure we are better equipped to conduct our work safely and responsibly.
To promote a safe and more informed laboratory environment, the following essential information were displayed on the laboratory notice board:
General Lab Safety
All our experiments was conducted in the bioengineering Risk group level 2 laboratory.
Safe Working Areas
The lab was equipped with safe working areas such as:
Emergency
To ensure quick response in case of an accident, our lab was properly equipped with:
Waste Disposal
Considering we were working with plasmids containing antibiotic resistance genes, we had to prevent environmental contamination and ensure safety by autoclaving all used and old plates or tubes containing bacteria at 121°C for 15-30 minutes using a biohazard autoclave bag before their disposal.
The laboratory was equipped with waste systems for the disposal of various materials. This includes:
