Difference between revisions of "Team:Cologne-Duesseldorf/Test"

Designing a Customizable Synthetic Cell Compartment Toolbox

Synthetic organisms provide a wide range of applications with the potential to tackle the biggest challenges humanity faces. Their creation is therefore one of the major goals in synthetic biology. Many breakthroughs have been achieved in the last decade, however, the creation of a fully synthetic cell is yet a milestone to reach for.
A common approach tries to build up artificial cells from scratch, whereas we want to start by engineering artificial compartments through orthogonalization. For designing these new compartments we plan to establish an open source toolbox accessible to the community at large. This will make it possible to boot up a compartment perfectly tailored for a specific application, which will enable cheaper and more efficient production of biofuels, pharmaceuticals, or high value chemicals.
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.