Team:UANL Mty-Mexico/Project/Applications

Applications: Vision and perspectives of the project.

With this project the team not only focuses on the riboswitches use like non-invasive genetic regulators, also we would like to take full advantage and go beyond. Our vision is that the riboswitches could be used to control and redirect the metabolic fluxes in a big scale industrial process, always aiming to optimize and reduce cost in the process.

Within the range of industries that can benefit with this system of metabolic regulation are: the food industry, pharmaceuticals, bio-energy, and as such, any industry that has as its objective the production of a metabolite of high economic interest by biotechnological processes. For example, we have the amino acid production like glutamate, aspartic acid and the phenylalanine, which are used like flavoring in the food industry; in another hand, we have the ethanol and biodiesel which are high interest biofuels in the bio-energy industry.

The outline of the devised process consists basically in:

1. Using metabolic pathways, locate the direction of metabolic flow whereby we can obtain the desired metabolite.

2. Locate the “leaks” that avoid metabolic flux arrive directly to the desired metabolite production.

3. Replace the RBS of the enzymes that avoid metabolic flux arrive directly to the desired metabolite, by the Riboswitch with activity to 37°C.

4. Grow the E. coli culture to 37°C until get its carrying capacity, ie, until get the stationary phase in the bacterial growth. In this step the bacterial culture will grow in the normal form and its fluxome will be intact.

5. Upon reaching the stationary phase we need decrease the temperature to about 30 ° C. At this time due to inactivation by temperature, decrease the production of the enzymes selected and modified with this regulatory system, thus the metabolic flux is redirected and focused production of the metabolite of interest.