Team:Marburg/Results
SynDustry Fuse. Produce. Use.
Results
Approaches towards artificial endosymbiosis
We had several subprojects towards achieving our big goal of establishing artificial endosymbiosis and providing the iGEM community with a list of fully charakterized kill switches.
Dependency. Keeps the system together.
In order to guarantee the fitness of the host organism as well as the invading cell, we established different exchange-based dependencies - a malonate based dependency with the invading E. coli cell as the malonate source and a protein based dependency complementing essential gene knockout.
PEG Method. Brings the system together.
Since our whole project relies on the utilization of the principles of endosymbiosis for production purposes, we had to decide for a method to bring the organisms together. This was accomplished by modification and optimization of a protocol using polyethylene glycol (PEG).
Production Line. Novel system for modular synthesis.
Design of a production line that starts with limonene production in E. coli and export in S. cerevisiae. Limonene gets hydroxylated to the cancer drug perillyl alcohol and exported to the media.
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.
