Difference between revisions of "Team:Cologne-Duesseldorf"

Designing a Customizable Synthetic Cell Compartment Toolbox

Have you ever looked at an airplane and thought about how intricately each part has to be designed to fit into the overall machine? Engineers have long used the technique of designing, testing and redesigning components of larger machines in order to improve them. Because they understand every detail of the machine they are able to accurately predict the behavior of each part. This has lead to the development of ever-more useful tools.
Every Biologist dreams of being able to utilize this process with the same efficiency. They spend a whole lot of time planning the part and its function in the respective organism. Then they integrate the part and find out that it either doesn't work, kills the cell or does something else unexpected. This is because most of the time the organism is not completely understood and there is interference with some part of the metabolism. Our aim is to remove this problem! Our team "artico", which stands for artificial compartments, has created a fully customizable cell compartment toolbox which can be used to create a reaction room inside a cell tailored exactly to the users needs. Our compartment can import proteins specifically chosen by the user, change its luminal environment as well as its size, and secrete its content to the extracellular medium. It can be used for a wide variety of purposes, be it basic research, compartmentation of toxic metabolic pathways, or even more exotic functions such as in vivo protein crystallization.

Medal Criteria

Real world application

By integrating enzymes or biosynthetic pathways into semi-permeable organelles we gain higher concentrations of enzymes and metabolites and provide a basis for the ideal operation of specialized enzymes. Furthermore, toxic or unstable intermediates can be sustained and naturally incompatible reactions can take place simultaneously. We have chosen yeast peroxisomes as our chassis for designing this synthetic organelle, which are very resistant, have a useful import mechanism and are expendable under optimal conditions. As a proof of concept for our compartimentation strategy we intend to establish the Nootkatone pathway inside the peroxisome. Nootkatone is a natural compound found inside the peel of the grapefruit, which gives it its characteristic taste and smell. In addition to that, Nootkatone is a natural repellent for mosquitoes and ticks and is already being commercially used and industrially manufactured. Unfortunately, the production costs for it are extremely high, because it either must be extracted from the peels of hundred of thousands of grapefruits or synthesized inside of yeast. The problem here is, that the Nootkatone pathway is toxic for yeast and the efficiency is rather low. Here is where our compartmentation comes into play, as we plan to implement the hole pathway into the modified peroxisome.