Team:Uppsala
What are we doing this year?
This year iGEM Uppsala is Crafting Crocin. Crocin is an apocarotenoid (organic pigment) found in saffron, extracted from Crocus Sativus. Crocin, and several other pigments in the crocin pathway, are the compounds which gives saffron it’s beautiful crimson color and delicious taste. The pathway compounds have great potential as organic dyes for industrial applications. On top of this, recent studies suggest that these colorful components have several medicinal properties. The crocin pathway is very poorly characterized and in addition to this the production of saffron is very expensive. Our market analysis show that the harvest of saffron is labour-intensive, but it has a promising increase in market value. By using synthetic biology for recombinant expression in E. coli we hope to 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 Crafting Crocin further, we have done extensive homology modeling, steered molecular dynamics (SMD) and kinetics estimations to characterize the enzymes in our pathway.
When working with recombinant microorganisms, we realized it was very important for us to take the ethical aspects into account. To understand the ethics further we spoke to experts, collaborated with other iGEM teams and organized events for the public to find out more about iGEM and Ethics.
Our achievements this year are:
1. We successfully integrated all five steps of the FPP to zeaxanthin pathway into the E. coli chromosome. The result is a E. coli strain expressing zeaxanthin.
2. We have created sequenced verified BioBricks of our three enzymes in the crocin pathway: CaCCD2, CsADH2946 and UGTCs2. We have also modeled these enzymes.
3. We are the first to purify and confirm activity of CsADH2946 as well as estimating the kinetic parameters.
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 all our wiki page has to offer!
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 on the pathway to saffron. We promise that these have some nice and funky colour to look at! 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 onto a chromosome instead of plasmid! Are you super curious about how did that go? Click here!
Do you want to know more about what we achieved in this project? Did we manage to get our enzymes into a chromosome or was it huge fail? Did we produced some cool compound from the crocin pathway? If you are shivering with anticipation? Click here!
