From 2011.igem.org

Make it or Break it: Diesel Production and Gluten Destruction, the synthetic biology way

Synthetic biology holds great promise to produce vital products and destroy harmful ones. This summer, we harnessed the power of synthetic biology to meet the world’s needs for fuel and medicine. Make It: We constructed a strain of Escherichia coli that produces a variety of alkanes, the main constituents of diesel fuel, by introducing a pair of genes recently shown convert fatty acid synthesis into alkanes. Break It: We engineered an enzyme – to be taken in pill form – that breaks down gluten, a component of staple foods that can causes severe immune responses. The protease Kumamolisin-As was identified and then reengineered using computational techniques, improving its ability to cleave gluten peptides over 10-fold. Finally, to enable next-gen cloning of iGEM parts BioBrick vectors optimized for Gibson assembly were constructed and used to construct the Magnetosome Toolkit: genes for biofabrication of magnetic particles.

Current biofuels are made up of compounds that have properties that make them not a perfect substitute for gasoline. A much better solution would be to use bacteria to produce alkanes, the main chemical found in gasoline. This system would allow for the production of net-carbon neutral gasoline from organisms that can directly or indirectly utilize carbon dioxide. One of the goals of our team is to optimize alkane production in E. coli as a model for alkane production in such organisms.

Celiac disease is a genetic disorder in which the human digestive system is unable to properly process gluten, a protein found in wheat. Several attempts to produce an enzyme capable of cleaving gluten have been made, but no viable enzyme has been fully implimented. Our team is attempting to engineer an enzyme capable of both surviving in the digestive system, and be able to still cleave gluten.