Safety
The safety of the UCSF 2010 iGEM team, other scientists in the shared lab area, and environment has been a great concern for us throughout the project. Before we were even allowed to touch a pipette, every member of the team was certified by UCSF’s Office of Environmental Health and Safety after completing the required lab safety training. Throughout our project, we wore lab coats and gloves while working in the lab area and adhered to the safety guidelines of the Office of EH&S. A separate lab coats and new gloves were used when working in the tissue culture room to prevent cross contamination between the biohazard levels. Ethanol is used in the tissue culture room and on tables to kill any microbes that might be on the surfaces to prevent contamination.
When working in a lab, we considered the safety of the scientists working in the lab as well as the general public outside of the lab. During our project, we had the general potential lab hazards that occur in our day-to-day lab work, such as the use of SYBR Safe, broken glass, the use of ethidium bromide, fire, toxic fumes, flammable reagents, and contamination of clothes. We tried to offset these potential hazards by taking precautions, such as wearing a lab coat and gloves at all times when working with any reagents, storing flammable reagents in fireproof cabinets, and putting sharps in the sharps container, rather than mixing all the waste in a single garbage can. However, all of our new BioBrick parts that we made for our 2010 iGEM project are plasmids, which did not raise safety issues.
We believe that as long as the proper precautions are taken and the safety guidelines are followed, most of the safety concerns can be prevented. Constant changing of gloves will help prevent a lot of future safety issues. A possible extra precaution to make parts, devices, and systems safer would be to put suicide genes into the sequences to prevent unintended introductions of them into the environment.
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