Ensuring Safety

Safety was a significant concern in the design of our project. We wanted to make sure not only that we were safe when working on our project, but that the final system that we designed would be safe to use in the field. We worked to ensure this in a number of ways, which can be outlined below:

Laboratory Personal Safety

All of the students working on the Calgary 2013 team received all of the necessary training as outlined in the University of Calgary’s safety policy. In brief, this included a Biosafety course as well as Workplace Hazardous Materials Information Systems (WHIMIS) training. In addition, students took a course introducing them to the necessary laboratory skills where they learned how to perform requied techniques both safely and efficiently.

In addition to proper training, the project that we undertook posed little risk to the students. The only organism used in our project was a commonly used lab-strain of Escherichia coli, which is designated as a biosafety I level organism. All necessary chemicals and reagents were handled with care and Material Safety Data Sheets were consulted when dealing with new compounds. Finally, students working in the lab were also supervised at all times by senior lab members, advisors or our lab manager.

Figure 1. Showing off our PPE.

Safety in the Design

In addition to the safety of ourselves, the safe design of our system was also a major concern. As we see our final system being implemented directly in a feedlot setting, it’s very important that design it not only to be extremely easy and quick to use, but also so that it will be completely safe for the person using it. We incorporated safety into our design in a number of ways. First of all, we decided to use an in-vitro system. Although we are engineering our bacteria to contain our genes of interest, we are using purified proteins from the bacteria in our actual test. This not only allows us to make use of a small, test strip that is able to be stored for long periods of time, but it ensures that our genetically modified bacteria will not be released into the environment no matter what happens to the strip system. This will allow for easier disposal of the strips as well as increased safety for the user.

Our next safety concern was surrounding the functionality of the prototype. Although we would not be using any actual bacteria in it, it was important to have something in the strip that would allow for a positive control, similar to what we see for pregnancy tests. In that system, one blue line appears in the test window in order to tell you that the test is working as it is supposed to, a sort of 'positive control' for the flow of the liquid and for the reagents. In order for our system to achieve similar reliability, we need the same thing. For our strip, the best way to ensure that our test is working the way we expect it to would be to have an actual positive control. In our system this would obviously need to be the shiga toxin gene, in order to verify in each test that our tales are binding as expected. Now this poses a problem for us. Not only is this not something that we could amplify from the genome ourselves or get syntheisezed by a company, but it is not something that we would really want to cover our strip in to sell to users. As such, we needed to find a safe way to do this. So we went and consulted with

Assessment of Accuracy

Another concern that we have