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Team:Manchester/Aimtest2
From 2013.igem.org
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| - | E. c(oil)i; The Lean Green Fat-Producing SynBio Machine | + | <i>E. c(oil)i</i>; The Lean Green Fat-Producing SynBio Machine |
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Revision as of 21:31, 27 September 2013
Introduction:
Palm oil is a huge business. From food products such as margarine and chocolate, to cosmetics and even applications in biodiesel, palm oil is the most widely used vegetable oil in the world, and its demand is only increasing. But what most of the manufacturers of these products fail to publicly address is the massive devastation caused by ripping up rainforests in order to make room for oil palm plantations. Not only does this mass deforestation damage the planet by increasing carbon emissions and decreasing the amount of CO2 taken up from the atmosphere, it also destroys the homes and habitats of thousands of endangered animals, including orangutans and tigers. Additionally, many rainforests are found growing atop peatlands, and so it follows that when they are ripped up or burned, colossal amounts of CO2 are released. CO2 is of course a greenhouse gas and so obviously this has a big impact on the extent and rate of global warming. We discuss the devastation associated with the palm oil industry extensively over on our Ethics pages.
Palm oil is made up of four major components: palmitic acid (44%), stearic acid (4.5%), oleic acid (39.2%), and linoleic acid (10.1%). These four fatty acids are fractionated from crude palm oil and used in various different applications according to their degree of saturation- stearic acid is used primarily in cosmetics, where oleic acid is an important oil used in cooking, for example. The biosynthesis of fatty acids has been studied extensively in E. coli, which makes this the ideal chassis for our project.
Our aim is to overexpress the pathway of naturally occurring saturated fatty acids (palmitic (C16:0) and stearic acid (C18:0)) to result in a net increase in their production, and then insert non-native genes to introduce double bonds in stearic acid, to yield oleic (C18:1, Δ9) and linoleic acid (C18:2, Δ9,12). Producing the most widely used and valuable components of palm oil in this way would render the widespread deforestation directly associated with the palm oil industry redundant, and so would halt this relentless destruction of the environment.
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