Team:Edinburgh UG/Description
Introduction
Biological synthesis and metabolic engineering have jointly emerged to provide an alternative to organic synthesis of drugs – given that most are derivatives of naturally found substances, meaning their synthetic pathway already exists in nature – and use of petroleum-derived fuels by offering a more sustainable and greener alternative for an energy source. For higher yield and lower cost, researchers have been optimising metabolic pathways by:
- identifying the ideal environment for the organism
- removing pathways that are unnecessary for the survival of the organism or the production of the product
- removing negative feedback
- codon optimisation
- increasing expressivity by the choice of promoter and RBS
- improving the methods for genetic modifications
- determining the rate limiting step of a synthesis and testing homologues enzymes that have higher reaction rates.
Given the number of aspects that are taken into consideration, metabolic engineering is a strenuous and time-consuming procedure. One of the contributing reasons is that by today’s method all genetic modification are introduced separately into the system. Our project aims to address this issue by designing a genetic construct that would randomly introduce multiple homologues into a culture. This means if we have a 5-step synthetic pathway and each step is tested for 4 randomly-expressed enzyme homologues, a culture will contain 1024 varied combinations of the 5 enzymes and thus we will be able to detect which one is the optimal combination of enzyme homologues.
