Safety in the Lab

Concerning our institution, safety in INSA Toulouse

INSA Toulouse is a public school, which have some laboratories used for public research. Everybody in the INSA must also follow the French work code, which legislates for respect of environment, workers and public safety. Most of the rules we have to follow are presented in the manual “Manuel de sécurité en laboratoires” (from the WHO), which permits us to know almost everything we have to know about safety with microorganisms we use and products we manipulate. In addition, daily use of Deming wheel allows us to improve the safety system and keep it updated..

Concerning the laboratory

Worker protections
As in every lab, we use conventional protection when manipulating. Every experiment has to be made with gloves and a conventional lab coat, which aimed at protecting the worker and avoiding contaminations. We also wear glasses when they are useful (UV exposition, EtBr using, hot water manipulations, chemicals manipulation…).

Waste gesture

After a formation for chemical waste gesture and biological hazard, we learn how to use different trash cabs as described in the picture. Biological wastes, potentially containing viable microorganism, are autoclaved in a special bag, then discarded by the classical way. Chemical wastes are regrouped and treated every month together with wastes of other labs of the campus.

Devices and Material

In this part, we’ll list all devices we use and how to use them safely:

Concerning E. calculus and project

Would E. calculus raise safety issues in terms of:

Do any of the new BioBrick parts (or devices) that you made this year raise any safety issues?

The only safety issue we can associate with our new Biobricks is researcher exposure to microorganism when testing the parts, but as mentioned earlier, all precautions are respected to avoid any problem. Our parts are also tested in different contexts, to assure their full functionality and safety whenever another team wants to use them.

Is there a local biosafety group, committee, or review board at your institution?

Our institute disposes of one person who is responsible t for security and safety in the lab, but we do not have any group or committee concerning biosafety in general. However, we possess review boards we can consult any time to answer our question about biosafety. In addition, biosafety was evaluated by the security laboratory officer who approved the project.

Do you have any other ideas how to deal with safety issues that could be useful for future iGEM competitions? How could parts, devices and systems be made even safer through biosafety engineering?

Our team does not have any local biosafety group or committee, information and documentation about biosafety and condition of application were pretty hard to find. However, we have the luck to work in a laboratory which already got all equipments and protocols to ensure a great Biosafety. It could be a good improvement for future iGEM competitions if iGEM staff could provide us way to ensure that safety is good enough to take part to the competition, like a “safety check-list”, or by putting some “limitations” about the manipulations, telling us what is dangerous or forbidden. (forbidden strains, forbidden modifications, dangerous and “key” manipulations…).
We also focused on the 2012 Paris-Bettencourt iGEM project, named ““Bware”, which proposes multiple ways to ensure that new synthetic constructions could never be an issue for health or environment, even if the strain is unfortunately released on the wild. For us, work of team Bettencourt is really important and should potentially be integrated on future iGEM standards and rules.