Team:Caltech

From Biofilms to Biofuel

Caltech’s 2012 iGEM team aims to manipulate bacteria to degrade stable organic polymers such as lignin and alginate; to use these substrates to synthesize biofuels, specifically ethanol; and to direct their ATP synthesis mechanism to rely on proteorhodopsin as the source of the proton gradient, freeing NADH to interact in the synthetic pathway instead. We will develop the three facets of the project in different strains of E. coli. We will then splice the manipulated sequences into one new organism.

Caltech is also collaborating with California Institute of the Arts to create an animation using a plate of E. coli transformed with mcherry plasmid.

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