Project Description

Producing high-value proteins in Phaeodactylum tricornutum

The diatom Phaeodactylum tricornutum is a widely spread organism in marine waters. Together with about 6000 other species, diatoms belong to the phylum of heterokonts. As a group of great ecological relevance diatoms are responsible for up to 20% of the global CO₂ fixation and generate about 40 % of the marine biomass of primary producers (Falkowski et al., 1998, Field et al., 1998).

In addition, diatoms represent an important source of lipids and silicate making them interesting for various biotechnological applications e.g. in biofuel industry, food industry and nanofabrication. “Normal” biotechnology is applied in bacteria and yeast. Both need to be fed with cost intensive chemicals and the purification of the products e.g. Proteins is very time consuming and difficult, due to the fact that the cells need to be cracked or chemicals in the medium need to be removed.

In contrast, P. tricornutum is a green organism living from CO₂ and light and love. The purification of the desired product is much easier, because the proteins are secreted to the surrounding medium. As a plant, microalgae don’t secret many other substances and therefore our product is already in a high purity available (Hempel et al., 2011).

In order to introduce this organism as a chassis to the iGEM community, we build a toolbox of expression vectors, promoters, selection markers, reporter proteins and signal peptides for P. tricornutum. This allows every future iGEM team to produce their own complex proteins, which can easily be purified.