Team:Stockholm/Lab work/Safety
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Revision as of 00:26, 24 October 2010
SafetyWould any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of researcher safety, public safety, or environmental safety? We follow good microbiological practice for all our laboratory work. All steps necessary to obtain a safe environment in the laboratory have been taken into consideration; this includes working and keeping lab areas clean and handling potentially hazardous reagents with appropriate safety equipment. Working with the BioBrick cloning standard we use several different antibiotic resistance markers. These types of selection markers are commonly used in our department and our group follows the handling procedures regulated by the department’s safety protocols, available on the intranet. The cloning vectors carrying these selection markers are all non-conjugative and non-transferable, minimizing the risk of spread to non-laboratory environment. Furthermore, bacterial cell cultures are either iodine inactivated with Jodopax or sterilized by autoclaving. Despite these safety precautions, in the unlikely event of spread, the bacteria used in our project are all non-pathogenic, well-established laboratory strains Escherichia coli with low survival probabilities outside the laboratory environment; also, culture volumes are kept minimal, thereby further lowering the risk of spread.
The rules and regulations are set by the Swedish Work Environment Authority. Our department (Department of Genetics, Microbiology and Toxicology) has permission to contain and handle genetically modified microorganisms (GMMs) up to containment level F activities. This is “an activity involving contained used of GMMs and entailing a negligible risk or none at all of harm to human health and environment”. The department is also following the safety measures using good microbiological practice. |