Introduction
It is important to maintain good laboratory practices for various reasons. All of which are an integral part of conducting research safely. Maintaining a clean and safe laboratory environment is essential both for safety reasons but also to make sure that experiments are conducted in the best condition possible making sure that they can be reproduced later both by yourself but also by others. For these reasons experiments need to be conducted in clean environments, both large and small lab equipment should be placed appropriately and their cleanliness should be kept to ensure proper performances. Samples should be prepared in appropriate and clean environments and must be stored in the appropriate conditions. Wastes should be appropriately disposed of both for environmental and health safety reasons but also due to legal repercussions.
Keeping good laboratory practices ensures the following merits:
- Better laboratory reputation
- Higher productivity in the lab
- Redoing experiments isn’t as necessary unless you absolutely needed to reproduce your results for scientific purposes
- Higher confidence in the reliability of your data
- More accurate initial results
Technical and HSE considerations
No food or drink
- Food and drinks are not allowed in the lab. This may expose you to dangerous chemicals and microbes.
- In addition, this could also contribute to unclean laboratory environment conditions affecting both yours and others’ experiments. It is also a source of destruction for others.
- In addition to food and drinks, chewing gums should be avoided for similar reasons.
Wear proper lab attire and PPE
- Wear lab coats and gloves before starting any experiment. This protects you from being exposed to dangerous chemicals and microbes. It also protects your samples from potential contaminators, DNases, and RNases.
- When handling liquid nitrogen wear proper protective gloves and goggles
- Although we have a safe gel imager with blue and white lights instead of UV, when working with gel extraction protocols use appropriate goggles to not expose your eyes to emitted lights from gel images as these lights are still strong.
- When working with intercalating dyes (e.g. SYBR safe, Orange G and other dyes) use ticker gloves (Nitrile) for extra protection.
- Similarly, use Nitrile gloves when handling strong chemicals.
- How the physical lab is engineered and the different safety environments (safety cabinets) can limit exposure to hazards and PPE can protect you, but making sure your behavior doesn’t lead to exposing both yourself and your colleagues to risks is very important.
Keep a clean and safe lab environment
- Make sure you work in a clean environment. Always start the day by cleaning your bench and small equipments
- This is very important specially when working with RNAs that get easily degraded. Clean all surfaces of your bench and small lab equipments with 70% EtOH and/or RNase-Off spray
- Make sure you always use gloves when handling anything in the lab, spray your gloves with 70% ethanol, every now and then, particularly when working with RNA samples
- End the day by properly discarding your waste, tidying your working area, and placing things in their appropriate place.
- If you make a spill, make sure you properly clean the affected area and discard wastes properly.
- Always read the SOP or SDS when working with new procedures and chemicals.
- Always clean up common areas (safety cabinets, common benches and so on) after you use them.
- When working on the lab desktop computer, make sure to remove your gloves.
Keep hygiene
- Start your days by washing your hand and do the same when leaving the lab
- Keeping your personal items separate from lab work ensures prevention of spread of hazardous reagents and cuts off potential exposure routes.
Label your work space
- Label all containers. Bottles and other containers containing buffers, samples or other aliquotes should be labeled with their contents. This is essential so that others are able to know what hazards may be present in the lab but also makes your life easy by not remembering what is in which bottle. In principle it is nice to include in the label what hazards are present.
- Any research process with a particular hazard should also be labeled with that hazard.
- We usually incorporate hazard pictograms in SOPs for particular experiments (see examples in this folder). If your experiment is being conducted for the first time in the lab and is not adapted with the current SOP format we follow in the lab, prepare one.
- Indicate date in all labels
- Labels of samples in small eppendorf tubes and other tubes should be clearly labeled (avoid using abbreviations and other labels that your colleagues won’t be able to understand). All results and associated samples are properties of the lab and when you complete your work and leave the lab, it should be easy for others to understand your labels. When working on collaborative projects it is important that samples and aliquots for shared use are understandable by all parties.
Use proper storage containers
- Storing organic solvents in plastic bottles can compromise the container, just like acids in metal containers or HF in glass. Chemicals should be stored in containers made of materials that will not react.
- Large volumes of flammable chemicals must be stored in fire rated cabinets. Chemicals known to react violently when mixed should be stored separately.
- Make sure wastes are discarded in appropriate containers. Check the hazard pictograms of the chemical/reagents you are discarding. If this requires special handling, store separately, and coordinate with DIna Aronsen to submit this to the HSE coordinator.
- When receiving new chemical/reagents related to your project, make sure you read the hazard labels and pictograms and store them in the appropriate cabinet.
Avoid working alone particularly in cases where potential risks are high
- We are a small group of people who work in experimental lab, therefore, although in general sense, one should avoid working in the lab alone (to have someone close by in case of an emergency), we often might be in a lab alone.
- Most of the work we do is not extremely dangerous and hence, this should be OK in most cases.
- But in cases where you need to work with large amounts of liquid N2 (e.g. getting a liquid N2 aliquot), always operate the tank together with someone in the lab.
Stay Focused and be Aware of Your Surroundings
- A lab can be a busy environment with researchers working on different things that can have different hazards. Therefore, it is important to be attentive of your surroundings.
- Always work with purpose, in some cases the lab environment could be filled with distractions. Therefore, it is particularly crucial to be focused and attentive when working with hazardous substances.
- Avoid using headphones. It is possible to miss some accidents such as a sound of a glass container with hazardous substance breaking or a warning from a colleague. Therefore it is better to avoid using headphones all together or if you can not work without listening to music, it is at-least better to lower your volume, or listen with only one ear covered.
Scientific considerations
Design/plan experiments before hand
- Planning your day before going into the lab saves you time, ensures efficiency when working on experiments and avoids unexpected delays.
- Write down what you plan to do, determine and locate samples and if you have the necessary reagents, perform the measurements and calculations you need for the experiment you planned on conducting before starting your experiment.
- Record everything you are doing in the lab and organize them at the end of the day into your lab journal.
- If you are preforming a experiment or protocol the lab has not preformed before, check https://www.mn.uio.no/ibv/english/about/hss/laboratories/sop/ to see if there already is a SOP (risk assessed protocols) for that procedure.
Always use dedicated small equipments, label and keep them in your dedicated lab bench
- Avoid borrowing pipettes, buffers and so on. It is especially important to only work with your own dedicated pipettes to ensure reproducibility of your results.
- It is also important to have your own buffer bottles or aliquots of buffers and other reagents which you should label and place in a dedicated space. This is important to avoid cross-contaminating other colleagues’ bottles and also avoid potential cross-contaminations to your own bottles and aliquotes.
Store your samples, reagent aliquots and so on in your dedicated box/container and at appropriate conditions
- Make sure that all reagents, chemicals and solutions are stored in their appropriate conditions (Room temperature (RT), +4 oC, -20 oC or -80 oC freezers )
- Make sure you have a dedicated space in the special condition storages. If you don’t have a dedicated space in +4 oC, -20 oC or -80 oC freezers ask Dina Aronsen or Roza Berhanu Lemma to be assigned one.
Make sure that experiments are conducted in best conditions
- Some experiments can be conducted on a bench at RT, whereas others should be conducted on an ice or in the cold room. Make sure what you are working on is temperature sensitive or not.
- In some cases you need to perform a reaction in the dark to avoid exposure to light. In such cases use opaque tubes for light sensitive reagents. If you don’t have such tubes or in the right size, cover your tubes with aluminum foil.
- If your experiment requires aseptic condition make sure you work in a Laminar Air Flow Cabinet (LAFC)
- When working with mammalian cell culture, work in cell lab in the dedicated LAFC (E2 lab area)
- When working with bacterial cells, work in bacterial lab in the dedicated LAFC (E3 lab area)
- When working with dangerous chemicals or liquids that evaporate, work in the fume hood/safety cabinet.
- Make sure you know how to operate in these LAFCs and safety cabinets. If you are not sure, ask someone in the team.
Always record everything you do and keep a daily lab journal
- It is important to record everything you do in the lab. This makes sure that your experiments are reproducible. It is often ourselves that will have trouble reproducing our own experiments, if we don’t keep a proper record of what we have done.
- It’s also important you keep a nice and organized journal, which you have to leave behind in the lab when the work is completed.
- Keep all recorded raw data from quality checks (nanodrop, bioanalyzer ect) and qPCRs.
- Keep in mind where you store data if using patient samples. If you are unsure about data storage
Relationships and collaborations
- Always discuss with the people you work closely with but also with anyone in the group.
- Ask anything if you are in doubt.
- Since most of the experiments are collaborative, make sure you communicate your absence if you are not able to come into the lab on certain days. This allows others to decide and prioritize tasks that are sensitive and need immediate attention.
- When materials, reagents, and chemicals are running low, inform DInaAronsen to place order in advance before the last bit of material/reagent/chemicals are used up.
Other important things to consider
- Certain plastics, glassware and reagents should be autoclaved/dry sterilized. Deliver these to “the kitchen” washing facility. Here you have to label the plastics and reagents with autoclave tape and glassware/metal with dry sterilization tape. Label the item with “Mathelier” and remember to pick up the item the day(s) after.
- Always take care of the instruments in the lab, ask Dina Aronsen or Roza Berhanu Lemma if you are not sure how to operate the different instruments and make sure that the instruments are not left ON unnecessarily.
- 10 commonly broken laboratory practices: (https://bitesizebio.com/8862/10-commonly-broken-good-laboratory-practices/)
Computational Biology & Gene Regulation 