General Laboratory Directions

1. Always read notices at the entrance of the laboratory before you enter in to the laboratory.

2. Leave bags, books and other items outside (in a locker) which are not necessary for work in the
laboratory.

3. Eating, drinking, smoking and applying cosmetics are prohibited inside the laboratory.

4. Before enter into the laboratory, all should wear a fresh, clean, knee length laboratory coat with
sleeves up to wrist. Should wear shoes that cover feet (Personal Protective Equipment -PPE). Any cuts or
abrasions on body should be covered with adhesive plasters.

5. Learn good personal habits from the beginning. i.e: to tie back long hair away from the shoulder; do
not wear bangles, wrist watches, rings to laboratory sessions; keep fingers, objects like pencils handled
in the laboratory should be kept away from mouth; do not lick labels with tongue. Use tap water or self-
sticking tapes.

6. Read the laboratory protocols before you start your work. Keep the protocols away from the clinical
specimens. Use separate marker pens for labeling of specimens.

7. Do not touch your eyes, nose and mouth with contaminated hands.

8. Perform the procedures to minimize splashes and generation of aerosols.

9. Do not forcibly expel material from a pipette and do not pipette by mouth.

10. Wear gloves when handling clinical specimens and cultures. Remove your gloves as soon as you
finish the work. When conducting procedures likely to generate aerosols, wear a protective mask and
goggles.

11. Wherever possible do the aerosol generating procedures inside a bio-safety cabinet.

12. At the start and the end of each laboratory session, students should clean their assigned bench top
area with a disinfectant solution provided. That space should then be kept clean and uncluttered
throughout each laboratory period.

13. Discard all cultures and used glassware into the containers provided for contaminated items. Plastic
or other disposable items should be discarded separately from glassware.

Never place contaminated pipettes or cotton wool plugs on the bench top.

Never discard contaminated cultures, glassware, pipettes, tubes or slides in the waste paper baskets
or garbage can.

Never discard contaminated liquids or liquid cultures in the sink.

14. If any accident occurs inside the laboratory call the officer in-charge immediately.

15. Accidental spillage of bacterial cultures or other contaminated material should be reported
immediately to the officer in-charge or the attending tutor.

16. Do not remove specimens, cultures or equipment from the laboratory without permission.
17. Handle the organisms in the respective bio-safety level.

Hazard group 1 – Organisms that are not known to cause infections in healthy

adults.

Organisms can be handled on open bench in a containment

Level 1 laboratory.

Hazard group 2 - Organisms that may cause human diseases and may be a hazard to laboratory workers
but are unlikely to spread in the community. Laboratory exposure rarely causes infections and effective
prophylaxis or treatment is usually available. Organisms can be handled inside a class 1 bio-safety
cabinet in a containment level 2 laboratory.

Hazard group 3 – Organisms that may cause severe human diseases and present a serious hazard to
laboratory workers. They may pose a risk of spread in the community, but there is usually effective
prophylaxis or treatment. Organisms can be handled inside class 1, 2 or 3 bio-safety cabinets in a
containment level 3 laboratory.

Hazard group 4 – Organisms that cause severe human disease and pose a risk to laboratory workers.
They may pose a high risk of spread in the community and there is usually no effective prophylaxis or
treatment. Organisms should be handled in a class 3 bio-safety cabinet in a containment level 4
laboratory.

18. Do not sit on the bench top.

19. Wash hands once the work is finished and whenever the hands are contaminated with a clinical
specimen or culture of organisms.

20. Do not walk outside the laboratory with overcoat and gloves.

21. Remove gloves before handle any laboratory records.

22. Before leaving the laboratory, remove the over coat and carefully wash and disinfect your hands.

Things usually forgotten in Lab:

1. Wear Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) sometimes, not all the time.

Chemicals are often hazardous, and you can contaminate a sample when deciding to work with bare
hands. Even if you do everything humanly possible to reduce the risk, there will always be a chance of
something dangerous spilling, splashing or exploding onto your skin or clothes. Wearing proper PPE
ensures that in the rare event of an accident you will be protected. PPE is inexpensive, durable and can
be easily replaced, so wear your PPE every time.

2. Decide not to run a control sample.

Controls serve two very important purposes. They show whether or not your chemistry worked
appropriately and they serve as the basis by which you can make a definitive comparison between
groups of samples. Consider running an experiment without a control. The data that is collected is 0
overall; in essence, it appears as if the experiment did not work. Did it really fail to run, or is the data
really as it is? Run a control sample every time so you know.

3. Update a laboratory notebook with only abbreviated details.

Often, you will revisit a project to review data before publication, rerun the experiment for validation or
compare one experiment to another. Always making complete entries helps you to make sense of what
you did in the past: “See network drive for data file” is great as long as you note which file it is… “The
control sample did not work” is ambiguous until you describe the type of control sample and
experimental conditions. Give yourself a helping hand and be thorough with everything you write in
your laboratory notebook.

4. Don’t write anything down.

Of course, it helps to be consistent with record keeping. At the end of a project, your supervisor will
want to review procedures and data from beginning to end. You can only show and tell so much at a
laboratory meeting, so when it comes to anything you’ve done in the lab, one good rule to live by is, “If
it wasn’t written down, it probably didn’t happen.”

5. Don’t calibrate your equipment.

An uncalibrated machine can measure fantastical values. And if you calibrate it, but select the wrong
measurement mode, you can run into a situation where you grossly under- or over-measure how much
stuff is inside your tube. Before using any piece of equipment, take a moment to ensure that it is
properly calibrated first.

6. Use tools or equipment that are “too big” for the job.

A 100ul volume can be measured with either a 100ul or 1000ul pipettor, but the exact measurement
between those two pipettors will differ. Even with a 1% error, the difference in volume pipetted could
be 1ul or 10ul, respectively (+/- 10X). Every instrument has its limitations. Keep variability within your
experiment low by selecting instruments that are the right size for your measurements.

7. Work through your math and units only once.

Practice the habit of double- and triple-checking your work. Before mixing up that expensive batch of
media, review units and calculations to see that your numbers make sense.
8. Use samples before quality checking them.

Chemical carryover of chloroform, phenol, ethanol or salts from DNA or RNA extractions can halt
reactions in other experiments. Checking the integrity and quality of your samples through
spectroscopy, gels or other means is a simple way to find out if you need to clean up before moving on.
Strive to generate the highest quality samples that you can, above and beyond any noted lab- and assay-
minimum requirements.

9. Put off required refresher training.

Yearly refresher training may seem redundant, yet it serves a very important purpose: to ensure that all
staff are on the same page when it comes to safety, conduct and responsibility. This training keeps
important topics fresh in your mind. Who knows, one day you may draw upon it to help a colleague to
return to good laboratory practices.

10. Communicate with your lab-mates sparingly.

The road to a successfully completed project is filled with collaboration and communication. The more
you communicate with those around you, the better chance you have of accommodating everyone’s
needs. This is especially important when all equipment and bench space is shared. And if you work in a
lab that routinely does fluorescence microscopy, it’s always nice to have a heads-up before
unexpectedly finding yourself having to work in the dark.