Team:US AFRL CarrollHS/Improve

As part of the gold medal criteria to improve a previous years part, the team decided to improve on British Columbia’s (2013) three parts (BBa_K1129003, BBa_K1129042, and BBa_K1129039) to create the “flavor” of cinnamon through the production of the molecule cinnamaldehyde. These three parts created enzymes to break down the naturally produced, in E. coli., molecule phenylalanine into cinnamaldehyde. Our team decided to take these three separate parts and combine them into a singular part for easier use and cloning. Two ribosomal binding sites were also added in front of the second two parts in order to increase the efficiency of the production of the enzymes to create the cinnamaldehyde (The first part did not need an RBS as the promoter had one attached). In the context of this year’s project, this part would be used in order to produce the cinnamaldehyde molecule as a means of killing off bacteria and fungi that contaminate biofuels in containment systems. This molecule will also kill off the bacteria that is producing it, effectively causing it to be the bacteria’s killswitch. This will ensure that the engineered bacteria will not begin to contaminate the containment system as well. However, due to the part ending up around 5 kb and time constraints, the team was unsuccessful at cloning the part into the iGEM backbone in time for submission and it was not submitted.