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Contents |
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 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.
That's where we come in.
Palm oil is made up of four major components: palmitic acid, stearic acid, oleic acid, and linoleic acid. These four fatty acids are fractionated from crude palm oil and used in various different applications - 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 exploit the pathway of naturally occurring saturated fatty acids (palmitic (C16:0) and stearic acid (C18:0)), 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 palm oil in this way would remove the need to plant oil palm trees, and so would reduce the amount of deforestation occurring.
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