Description

Tell us about your project, describe what moves you and why this is something important for your team.

Project Description

We are engineering E. coli to produce taxol from an intermediate (10-Deacetylbaccatin III) in the taxol synthesis pathway. We are using a modular approach to link the five necessary genes together onto a single DNA strand so that our design can be easily adapted for next generation taxanes in the future. Each gene in the pathway will be equipped with a T7 promoter of various strengths from a promoter library, fitted to the genes using the ePathOptimize approach for metabolic engineering. The project's end goal is to analyze the activity of produced taxol and evaluate this taxol biosynthesis design's feasibility in industrially relevant conditions. Homology modeling is used to develop protein models for the five necessary genes to determine active site architecture and catalytic functions. These models will then be considered when mutating the genes to produce next generation taxane products.

What are we doing?

Our project aims to engineer E. coli to produce taxol. We are building on the work of the 2016 Duke iGEM team, which started the design and execution of this biosynthesis project. Their website can be found here. Our project has planned and worked to assemble a 5 gene pathway that, when expressed, can make taxol from a cheap intermediate. Our project has also tested the protein expression of the 5 genes in our pathways.

References

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