The team here at Georgia State pride ourselves in taking the necessary precautions every step of the way to ensure a safe and pleasurable experience for our teammates. Seeing as every laboratory poses a risk of accident to the people who work in it day-to-day, we try to reduce all possibilities of an accident by educating our members on the protocol for all our laboratory work. We are working with organisms from Risk Group 1, so there is not much concern in regards to the organism. We will be culturing small volumes of E. coli, Pichia pastoris, and Agrobacter tumafaciens, no more than 1 L at a time for transformation with our recombinant DNA constructs and expression of transgenes. After transformation, we will attempt to produce CBDA synthase enzyme in Pichia, yeast and tobacco plants. None of these organisms will ever leave the lab and none of our gene products will be tested on any animals. The committee of biosafety here at Georgia State has reviewed and deemed our project safe as long as these precautions are taken!
