Team:Queens Canada/Parts

The YjgB enzyme is a medium-chain (1020 bp), zinc-containing enzyme and is part of the dehydrogenase/reductase family. For our project, we planned to use YjgB to reduce isoamyl aldehyde to isoamyl alcohol in order to eventually produce isoamyl acetate. Apart from playing a role in the conversion of isovaleric acid to isoamyl acetate, YjgB could play a useful role in metabolic engineering techniques. Much of today's research in the chemical industry focuses on how to produce fuels from biomass. This means that different microorganisms must be enabled to produce certain types of alcohols, such as ethanol, isobutanol, and n-butanol and the last step in this process involves conversion from an aldehyde to an alcohol. This is precisely where we believe our yjgB part will prove to be valuable. See our project page for more details on yjgB and to see the data we used to characterize this part.