Team:Johns Hopkins

VitaYeast: Synthetic Vitamin Production in S. cerevisiae

Vitamin deficiencies are estimated to affect 1 out of every 3 people in the world. Vitamin A deficiency alone is estimated to claim the lives of 670,000 children under the age of 5 annually. Due to the limitations of impoverished countries to increase the availability of foods with vital nutrients, 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). We hope the engineered yeast will be able to produce vital nutrients in significant amounts for use in bread-making, thereby 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. Currently, most governments combat malnutrition by distributing multivitamins or vitamin-enriched products to the public. However, these products often have a limited shelf life, require specialized (and often expensive) storage, and are often difficult to distribute in places with poor infrastructures - the areas that need these kinds of products the most. Because Baker's Yeast can be freeze-dried and stored for months on end under ordinary conditions, storage and transport across vast distances would be very feasible. Additionally, once inhabitants in developing countries receive the yeast and begin starters for bread, they can maintain these cultures indefinitely and spread them very easily among their friends and neighbors, aiding in the dissemination of the vitamin-enriched yeast. In essence, we would be giving these impoverished people a self-replicating vitamin factory, VitaYeast, which would finally allow people in developing countries to take control of some aspects of their personal health.

As part of this project, we are developing a yeast expression platform including a library of promoters, termination sequences, and shuttle vectors. While iGEM has 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 hope to gather data to help us understand the concerns held by both the developing world and local communities 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 towards global adoption.