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From food products, to cosmetics and biodiesel, palm oil is the world’s most widely used vegetable oil. Its demand is ever increasing; however the current method of extracting palm oil is severely unsustainable. Massive deforestation is required to build oil palm plantations, ruining the land of locals in Malaysia and Indonesia. Manchester iGEM aims to combat this by providing a more eco-friendly source of the four main components of palm oil. We reengineered the fatty acid biosynthesis pathway of E. coli to overproduce palmitic and stearic acid and introduced two new genes, Δ9 desaturase and Δ12 desaturase, to yield oleic and linoleic acid. To explore the scale-up potential of synthetic palm oil production in E. coli, we developed a fully parameterised kinetic model of the engineered fatty acid biosynthesis pathway.
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