This year iGEM Uppsala is Crafting Crocin. Crocin is an apocarotenoid (organic pigment) found in saffron, extracted from Crocus Sativus. Crocin, crocetin, zeaxanthin and other pigments in the crocin pathway, are the compounds which gives saffron it’s beautiful crimson color and delicious taste. The pathway compounds have a great potential as organic dyes for industrial applications. On top of this, recent studies suggest that these colorful components have several medicinal properties.
Our E. coli cells, producing saffron pigments.
The crocin pathway is poorly characterized and our market analysis on saffron shows that the compounds in the pathway are very expensive due to the labour-intensive harvesting process. By using synthetic biology for recombinant expression in Escherichia Coli we could reduce the price of the compounds within the crocin pathway and open up the possibility for industrial and medicinal applications to be further explored. To develop our project further, we have done extensive homology modeling, molecular dynamics and kinetic measurements to characterize the enzymes in our pathway. When working with recombinant microorganisms, and as well when introducing a new manufacturing method to the saffron market, we realized it was very important for us to take ethical aspects into account. To understand the ethical concerns further we spoke to experts, collaborated with other iGEM teams and organized events for the public.
Our achievements this year are:
1. We successfully integrated the first five steps of the crocin pathway from FPP to zeaxanthin into the E. coli chromosome. The result is a E. coli strain expressing zeaxanthin.
4. Finally we have combined the zeaxanthin producing strain with a plasmid containing all three enzymes from zeaxanthin to crocin, thus we successfully constructed a bacterial strain with all the genes needed to produce crocin and the pathway components.
Join us and learn more about the exciting journey we have taken by discovering what all our wiki page has to offer!
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Do you want to know more about our work with the crocin pathway? This year we were focusing on expressing enzymes that produce organic compounds in the pathway to saffron. To look at our results click here!
Do you want to know more about our zeaxanthin-producing E. coli strain? We worked on stabilizing the production of zeaxanthin. To do that we needed to do something called lambda red recombineering and put our enzymes into the chromosome instead of using a plasmid! Are you super curious about how it went? Click here!
Do you want to know more about what we achieved in this project? Did we manage to get our enzymes into the chromosome? Want to see some colors? If you are shivering with anticipation, Click here!
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