Motivations

1. Initial Idea of lignin degradation to produce higher valued vanillin. We look up the literature and we look at nature that can degrade the aromatic rings of Lignin. We needed an organism that could degrade aromatics.
2. For popular organism like E.coli and L. lactis., we need to make competent cells for transformation. We looked up into literature and nature and found many ‘Naturally Competent’ microorganisms. However, most of them are pathogenic and known to cause harm to humans. Hence, you cannot work with it in Biosafety level 1 lab. For example: Streptococcus pneumoniae (Griffith's "pneumococcus"), Neisseria gonorrhoeae, Bacillus subtilis and Haemophilus influenzae.