This year, the ZJU-China iGEM team aims to design and realize a tunable RNA scaffold to accelerate biosynthesis pathways and turn their on and off. As one of the most vital biomacromolecules, RNA plays a crucial role not only in coding process, but also in non-coding one. RNA scaffold is designed to colocalize enzymes through interactions between binding domains on the scaffold and target peptides fused to each enzyme in engineered biosynthesis pathways in vivo, which may suffered from low efficiency of production caused by relative lack of spatial organization of non-homologous enzymes. The scaffold allows efficient channeling of substrates to products over several enzymatic steps by limiting the diffusion of intermediates thus providing a bright future for solving the problem. Meanwhile, we plan to add an aptamer structure on RNA scaffold as a riboswitch to regulate biosynthesis pathways by micromolecular ligands. Then we can control the all-or-none binding relationship between the enzymes and RNA scaffold by whether the special ligands are presented or not.
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