Personal Safety:

When in the lab, each member of our team is careful to use gloves, goggles, and lab coats in order to protect us from any chemicals or specimens that might escape their containers. Although if some corrosive or other harmful chemical were to spill on the skin or in the eye of any person in the lab, there is an eye wash station and an emergency shower located conveniently in the lab. On the first day that our team was shown the lab, the locations of each of these safety measures were made known to us. In addition to these, we were also shown the binder where the MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheet) for each chemical in the lab is kept so that we would be able to handle and dispose of the chemicals properly.

Before any member of our team was able to participate in any lab work he/she was required take and pass a WHMIS (Workplace Hazardous Material Information System) test. Also, before beginning our project, as a team we had to observe and perform tutorials of the experiments that we were going to perform. Not only was this a fantastic learning experience, but also it helped us to become more comfortable in this lab setting and therefore less likely to make a mistake and compromise our safety. In addition to all of this, if any person had missed the instruction on how to use a piece of equipment properly or was unclear on a protocol, there is always an adviser in the lab with us and could explain.

Environmental/Public Safety:

Although it is unlikely that our specimens would unintentionally leave our lab area or that it would cause any extreme harmful effects if it did get outside of the lab, we still took precautions. The E-coli that we work with is a non-pathogenic strain (DH5 alpha) and is engineered not to be able to survive outside of our laboratory. Although this is also the case, each member of our team is extremely careful to keep the specimens in a sealed container and to transport it very carefully.

Although there is no biosafety group, committee or review board at our institution, we were required to follow university risk and safety guidelines. We also deferred to the Public Health Agency of Canada – Laboratory Biosafety and Biosecurity.