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From 2012.igem.org

Project Description

We are developing tools for yeast synthetic biology in both the academic and industrial settings. The Johns Hopkins Wetware Team presents two ideas demonstrating the versatility of yeast as a chassis that we hope will encourage other teams to adopt this organism for future projects.

Optogenetic cell cycle control

S. cerevisiae is a beloved model organism and its study has profoundly impacted our understanding of how eukaryotic cells function. In particular, mechanistic details of cell cycle control have been dissected using S. cerevisiae.  We believe that synthetic biology holds the potential to revolutionize traditional genetic and cell biology approaches. Thus, we are engineering an optogenetic cell cycle control system in S. cerevisiae to replace exogenous chemicals that are the current standard for inducing cell cycle arrest. Light induction is faster, more easily reversible, and completely orthogonal in yeast. Not only will our system introduce a new degree of precision to cell cycle arrest experiments, but we are designing a system that will allow future iGEM teams to extend our concept to other applications.

Ethanol self-regulation

S. cerevisiae represents an important industrial organism. In addition to its role in the production of ethanol, there is growing interest in using yeast to produce drugs and other compounds because of its capability to express complicated, heterologous biosynthetic pathways in their entirety. This overcomes obstacles such as costly chemical synthesis and/or multi step extraction procedures. A major concern in the production of novel compounds is the loss of viability of yeast cells due to ethanol toxicity. To address this, we are developing a genetic tool that regulates the production of ethanol. Specifically, we are engineering the expression of a human cytochrome enzyme with an intracellular sensor in order to modulate ethanol levels during fermentation. We hypothesize that by minimizing the ethanol-induced stress response, yeast cultures will devote more of their cellular resources to producing desired exogenous compounds.

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