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Overview of Yeast Toolkit
File:Fig2A-Violacein-chem-draw tcm18-128877.gif
[http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2008/July/28070801.asp Source]
Violacein purple pigment production serves as a simple way to test a multiple gene pathway (such as vitamin production) in an expression vector or neochromosome. If the gene construct is transformed and the organism becomes purple, the system is successful. As our main project is in yeast and since purple bacteria was achieved by Cambridge iGEM 2009, we focused on producing violacein in the eukaryotic S. cerivisiae yeast. We chose violacein specifically as a Boeke Lab rotation student used the Build-A-Genome method to engineer and sequence violacein building blocks for yeast. In essence, we had a head start with the violacein pathway as a significant portion of the gene assembly has been completed.
