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VitaYeast: Synthetic Vitamin Production in S. cerevisiae
Vitamin deficiencies are estimated to affect one out of every three people in the world. Vitamin A deficiency alone is estimated to claim the lives of 670,000 children under five annually. While increasing the availability of foods with vital nutrients is often limited by the resources in impoverished, we envision a simple and economic solution through our 2011 iGEM project: VitaYeast. The goal of VitaYeast is to implement vitamin production pathways in S. cerevisiae(Baker’s yeast). The engineered yeast will be able to produce vital nutrients in significant amounts while being used in bread-making, and thus placing additional nutrients into one of the most commonly eaten staples in the world.
The major power of VitaYeast comes from the fact that it enables sustainable malnutrition prevention in impoverished areas. The current ways most governments combat malnutrition is by the distribution of multivitamins or vitamin-enriched products. However, all these products have a limited shelf life, may require specialized storage (which is expensive), and are difficult to distribute to areas with poor infrastructures. These are generally the areas that need these kinds of products the most. Because Baker's yeast can be freeze-dried and stored for months on end in ordinary conditions, storage and transport across vast distances would be very easy. Additionally, once villagers in developing countries receive the yeast and begin starters for bread, they can maintain these cultures indefinitely and spread them very easily to their friends and neighbors, aiding in the dissemination of the yeast. In essence, we would give these impoverished people a self-replicating vitamin factory, VitaYeast, which would finally allow people from developing countries to take control of some aspects of their personal health.
As part of this project we are developing a yeast expression platform which is to include a library of promoters, termination sequences, and shuttle vectors. While iGEM has a many well characterized basic parts for E. Coli, yeast remains a largely untapped resource. The inclusion of shuttle vectors in our platform will allow future genetic engineers to take advantage of E. coli's ability to rapidly replicate while still being able to deploy their construct in S. cerevisiae. We hope our work will facilitate the use of yeast in future iGEM projects.
The final component of our platform is the synthosome: an entire synthetic chromosome. These chromosomes hold the potential to deploy synthetic systems with many more building blocks than a standard vector could. Since chromosomes are replicated and divided between offspring in an controlled and deliberate manner, the stability of constructs is improved as well.
Despite the promise of VitaYeast, its reception might still be hindered by the public's concerns with genetically modified food. These concerns typically include, but are not limited to, safety and environmental impact. Debates about genetically modified food have historically revolved around crops, but have recently broadened to animals as the technology advances and as natural resources deplete over the years. Therefore, in addition to wet lab experiments, we want to gather data to help us understand the concerns held by both local communities and the developing world regarding genetic modification and the global food supply. While we stand firm in our faith that synthetic biology can be a powerful tool for addressing global health needs, it is critical that we seek to place our solution on a firm path to global adoption
