Team:Marburg/Projects
SynDustry Fuse. Use. Produce.
Projects
Utilization of artificial endosymbiosis to abolish land grabbing through the production of terpenoid derived chemicals
The term "land grabbing" describes the acquisition of land, mainly in developing and newly industrialized countries through foreign investors to plant crops for food production as well as for the production of valuable secondary plant substrates, for example pharmaceuticals or biofuels derived from terpenoids [1]. Although production of secondary plant substrates through microorganisms is possible in general, it is mostly either inefficient or extremely expensive in terms of research [2]. This is mainly due to the different properties of various microorganisms, where some are more suitable than others for the production of a desired substrate. In addition, this often goes beyond the utilization of traditional model organisms in microbiology, such as S. cerevisiae and E. coli. As mentioned before, it requires great effort in terms of engineering one of these organisms to make the production of especially these secondary plant substrates feasible.
To make this production through microorganisms more interesting and therefore solve the issue of land grabbing for this purpose, our project "Syndustry – Fuse. Produce. Use" combines the naturally given advantages of various model organism strains. For this, we created an artificial endosymbiosis between different organisms, mainly S. cerevisiae and E. coli. The organisms can be specialized to overcome bottlenecks for improvement of biotechnological productions or can even grant possibilities for productions that have not been established to date. The process to make this possible can mainly be divided into three parts: establishing a dependency between the organisms, implementation of a production pathway and the actual fusion of the organisms.
Since the biological safety of our system would be relevant to the recipients and the environment, we also investigated in the behaviour of certain bacterial safety mechanisms, the kill switches. Instead of designing one of our own, we took advantage of the numerous kill switches already implemented in the iGEM database. Using these, we were creating a model describing their escape rate in terms of evolutionary stability seeing them as a genetic network. We did so in collaboration with the iGEM team of Lethbridge, who performed to experimental work for verification of our model.
Due to the multiplicity of kill switches designed in the past years of iGEM, we also created a simple and easy overseeable database of all kill switches either described or implemented. It contains all relevant information for the selection of a suitable kill switch, for example a classification regarding the [WHATEVER], inducer, toxin and a topology map.
Dependency. Keeps the system together.
Donec ullamcorper nulla non metus auctor fringilla. Vestibulum id ligula porta felis euismod semper. Praesent commodo cursus magna, vel scelerisque nisl consectetur. Fusce dapibus, tellus ac cursus commodo.
PEG Method. Blahblahblah.
Donec ullamcorper nulla non metus auctor fringilla. Vestibulum id ligula porta felis euismod semper. Praesent commodo cursus magna, vel scelerisque nisl consectetur. Fusce dapibus, tellus ac cursus commodo.
Production Introduction. Blahblahblah.
Donec ullamcorper nulla non metus auctor fringilla. Vestibulum id ligula porta felis euismod semper. Praesent commodo cursus magna, vel scelerisque nisl consectetur. Fusce dapibus, tellus ac cursus commodo.
Modeling. Evolutionary stability analysis of killswitches.
Quantitative work using mathematical modeling and numerics to study genetical killswitches. Treated as genetic regulatory networks, the stability of network topologies against evolution - selection and mutation - is studied.
Literature
- [1] Ajikumar, Parayil Kumaran, et al. "Terpenoids: opportunities for biosynthesis of natural product drugs using engineered microorganisms." Molecular pharmaceutics 5.2 (2008): 167-190.
- [2] Van Dien, Stephen. "From the first drop to the first truckload: commercialization of microbial processes for renewable chemicals." Current opinion in biotechnology 24.6 (2013): 1061-1068.
