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Practical 1

Instrumentation and Safety in the laboratory

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General precautions in laboratory

Wear laboratory protective clothes/coats and face shield or goggle when working in the laboratory.
All laboratory workers should undergo simple first-aid training
Do no eat, drink, store food in the laboratory
Personal hygiene and health practice cannot be over emphasized
Class A, B and C dry chemical fire extinguishers should be placed in the laboratory.
All bio-hazardous materials should be discarded accordingly after autoclaving
Staff need to be trained on the use of fire-extinguishers.

Instruments

Principle

An autoclave is an instrument that provides a physical method of sterilization by killing bacteria, viruses, and even spores present in the material put inside of the vessel using steam under pressure.
Autoclave sterilizes the materials by heating them up to a particular temperature for a specific period of time.
An enclosed chamber for heating substances above their boiling points under pressure using steam to sterilize liquids, glassware, etc.
See: Departmental Student manual pp71

Uses of Autoclave�

They are used to decontaminate specific biological waste and sterilize media, instruments, and lab ware.
Regulated medical waste that might contain bacteria, viruses, and other biological materials is recommended to be inactivated by autoclaving before disposal.
In medical labs, autoclaves are used to sterilize medical equipment, glassware, surgical equipment, and medical wastes.
Similarly, autoclaves are used for the sterilization of culture media, autoclavable containers, plastic tubes, and pipette tips.

HOT AIR OVEN

Uses of Hot Air Oven

Used to sterilizes heat-stable glass objects like flasks, pipettes, Petri-plates and test tubes, etc.
· Also used for sterilizing metal items such as scissors, forceps, spatula and scalpel, etc.
· Used to sterilize non-volatile compounds like sulphonamide, zinc and starch powder, etc.

Uses of Incubator

Incubators are used to grow microbial culture or cell cultures.
Incubators can also be used to maintain the culture of organisms to be used later.
Some incubators are used to increase the growth rate of organisms, having a prolonged growth rate in the natural environment.
Specific incubators are used for the reproduction of microbial colonies and subsequent determination of biochemical oxygen demand.
These are also used for breeding of insects and hatching of eggs in zoology.
Incubators also provide a controlled condition for sample storage before they can be processed in the laboratories

Uses of Water Bath

Used to homogenise chemical or reagent,

maintaining cell lines or heating flammable chemicals that might combust if exposed to open flame.

Anaerobic jar

Uses of Anaerobic Jar

Used to culture anaerobic organism such as
Neisseria gonorrhoeae, Neisseria meningtidis, Brucella Species, Sreptococcus pnemoniaae