The continuously growing field of industrial biotechnology has incited the replacement of non-renewable processes with more energy-efficient ones. Central to this is the use of genetically modified organisms modified with recombinant DNA technology for a wide variety of applications, ranging from the production of fine chemicals and pharmaceuticals to fuels and bioremediation [1]. These technologies and applications are largely dependent on the use of well-characterised industrial host organisms including Escherichia coli and Sacharomyces cerevisiae. However, such strains are not always the optimal choice for particular processes due to inherent metabolic limitations or a lack of consensus between the engineered components introduced into the host from a heterologous organism for the particular bioprocess.
While the well-characterised E. coli and S. cerevisiae have a host of molecular biology tools available for engineering them since they have been domesticated (they have been vastly changed from their wild-type and adapted to laboratory conditions), they come with distinct limitations, such as the inability to make the post-translational modifications found in eukaryotic proteins, with a high potential for protein misfolding, aggregation and degradation, besides incomplete translation due to different patterns of codon usage to eukaryotes [2]. Using native producer organisms in biotechnology may lead to higher productivities, but these non-model organisms often lack well-characterised genetic engineering tools, which may present difficulties in optimising and controlling metabolic pathways. This presents a major barrier to the widespread use of these organisms as biofactories.
The Edinburgh Overgraduate iGEM team will address those challenges by domesticating the desired host strains, applying synthetic biology (synbio) genetic engineering standards to the design of protein expression and metabolic engineering systems in a number of non-model organisms and characterising the behaviour of these standardised systems in a number of host strains with high potential for industrial applications. Furthermore, although it has its limitations in bacteria, we will include the CRISPR-Cas9 platform to assess its utility in these organisms as it is a potentially useful tool to have a better control of genomic perturbations and maximise those optimal expression systems and metabolic pathways. Through our project, the path is being paved so that other participants in the synbio community will more easily access these organisms in the laboratory, accelerating the understanding of these organisms and increasing the list of strains that are suitable for the manufacture of relevant products, including those that address global conservation challenges.
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