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 word code, which legislates for respect of environment, workers and public safety. Most of the rules we have to follow are presented on the manual “Manuel de sécurité en laboratories” (from the WHO), which permit 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 , 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 of 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 firstable autoclaved in a special bag, then discard on the classical way. Chemical waste 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 :

Researcher safety?
In this project, we are working with biosafety level 1 microorganism (according to World Health Organization (WHO) Laboratory Biosafety Manual → link) with Escherichia coli DH5α and DH51 strains, which are consider as biologically safe for users. Some of chemical compounds used could be dangerous for health (EtBr, Phenolchloroform..), but as previously described, all precaution are taken to ensure security and safety for all users.

Public safety?
As described in the overview, E. calculus should not go out the lab. Interactions with human body are not envisaged and public should also never be in contact with our modified organism. Every manipulations we proceed are made under great control, in a enclose environment. Each modification we apply to our strains should not be threatening for biodiversity and external organism. Furthermore, our strains are ingeneered and should not be able to survive in a external environment.
If a direct application is find for E. calculus (or just for logic gates we create and test), it will be generally a part of a process in closed reactor, or in controlled environnement. We also believe that our system is really safe and could never be an issue for public safety.

Environmental safety?
E. calculus should also not be deployed in environment and will stay in the lab, at least for instance. Of course, avoiding contamination and spreading implies a good gesture of biological waste (see the part above “waste gesture”). Furthermore, use of special strain permit us to be sure that none of our modified organism are spread out in the wild.

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 wrote earlier, all precautions are respected to avoid every 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 relevant for security and safety in the lab, but we don’t have any group or committee concerning biosafety in general. However, we posses review board we can consult any time to answer our question about biosafety. In addition, biosafety was evaluated by laboratory responsibles who don’t have any restriction letting us work in the lab on this 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 doesn’t 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 by 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 propose multiple ways to ensure that new synthetic construction could never be an issue for health or environment, even if the strain if 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.