so pissed off right now,is ethidiumbromide harmless or what? - (Sep/03/2008 )
In my last lab we had a little room for everything that had to do with ethidiumbromide. We incubated the agarose gels in EtBr for 20min after running, separate set of pippettes, tips, blue gloves. In this lab you put your blue gloves on touch the EtBr contaminated Erlenmeyer, weigh the agarose with teh same gloves, add TBE buffer with the same gloves, pick up the chambers, the pippete the Etbr into the mixture with your own pippette that you have to take from your place, put the pipette back and then wash your chamber in the sink and let it dry.
People leave scissors and pens there, they do SDS.page gels there. I share a bottle of desinfectant with someone, you took it over there and then put it back. After you print out you gel pic you throw away the gel which you move around with your hands and you take the pic in your contaminated hand and take it to your place and to your lab book when you stick it on without wearing any gloves obviously.
Am I being too picky here?
Just now I went to take a pic of my gel and the image looked funny as I was adjusting it, then I shut the door and wam! the green UV light turns on. That means it was on was I was adjusting the damn thing, someone forgot to turn it off and left the door open so it didnt flash green? Who would be so stupid? Or am I again being too picky and no harm was done
People leave scissors and pens there, they do SDS.page gels there. I share a bottle of desinfectant with someone, you took it over there and then put it back. After you print out you gel pic you throw away the gel which you move around with your hands and you take the pic in your contaminated hand and take it to your place and to your lab book when you stick it on without wearing any gloves obviously.
Am I being too picky here?
Just now I went to take a pic of my gel and the image looked funny as I was adjusting it, then I shut the door and wam! the green UV light turns on. That means it was on was I was adjusting the damn thing, someone forgot to turn it off and left the door open so it didnt flash green? Who would be so stupid? Or am I again being too picky and no harm was done
Every lab is different - it depends on how conscientious the supervisor is. My current lab is about the same as your new lab, but I think that having a separate room for everything having to do with EtBr is taking it a bit too far. The best thing to do is wash your hands thoroughly as often as possible and keep your bench clean so that you're not contaminating yourself when you don't have your gloves on. As for the UV light, you should be able to tell if its on with the door open -even without a green flashing light. If you didn't notice it, then my guess is that it wasn't on. Most geldoc systems are automatically set to turn off when the door is opened.