Phaectory

Phaectory: Antibodies grown with sunlight

The use of proteins in medical treatment and diagnosis is steadily increasing. Many pharmaceutically relevant proteins, such as antibodies, have a complex biological structure with specific posttranslational modifications. Furthermore, these proteins need to be highly pure because of their use in diagnostics and treatment. Therefore, a major challenge is the development of systems that produce pure, posttranslational modified proteins - best at low costs.

Recently, the sunlight-driven microalgae Phaeodactylum tricornutum has been established as an elegant tool for the production of proteins. A major - however yet unchallenged - advantage of this system is the production of advanced proteins with specific posttranslational modifications and the ability of their direct secretion into the medium allowing easy purification with low effort and costs. Our mission is to challenge Phaectory for the convenient production of antibodies and make the system accessible to following iGEM teams.

• INSECTSINSECTS : Some descriptive text can go here including links.
• MAMMALSMAMMALS : A little bit of text can go here.
• BIRDSBIRDS : Some information about birds can go here.
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• FISHFISH : Freshwater, tropical and marine fish.

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.