Team:UIUC-Illinois/Project/Future/AssemblyLine

From 2012.igem.org

Revision as of 21:19, 30 September 2012

Earlier this year, research at the Kee-Hong Kim lab of Purdue University had preliminary evidence showing that a phenolic compound, Piceatannol, had a potent ability to inhibit the development of human adipose cells. The mechanism is based around the idea that Piceatannol interacts with a preadipocyte's (immature fat cell) insulin receptors in such a way that surpresses it's growth into a mature adipose cell. Such a compound is a metabolite of a prime candidate for biochemical research, Resveratrol, which differs from Piceatannol only by an extra hydroxl group housed on one of its aromatic rings. Piceatannol is currently very costly to synthesize. On the advent of such a discovery, we felt that if we were to engineer a pathway to optimize the production of Piceatannol from cheaper substrates through the utilization of our PUF and RNA scaffold projects, we could show the versatility of our PUF toolkit working with an RNA scaffold. However, before research can begin in using our PUF toolkit to increase yields of in vivo E. coli compound production, our first steps involved acquiring and characterizing the necesary genes for our planned enzymatic assembly line. In total, our theoretical construct involves three main protein entities:

• Tyrosine Ammonia Lyase (TAL)
  from Dr. Fevzi Daldal's lab of the University of Pennsylvania
• 4-coumarate CoA ligase :: Stilbene Synthase fusion protein (4CL:STS)
  from the 2008 Rice University iGEM team
• Cytochrome P450 BM3 (BM3)
  from Dr. Chul-Ho Yun of Chonnam National University, South Korea