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Project Description
Vitamin and mineral deficiencies are estimated to affect one out of every three people in developing countries. Vitamin A deficiency, for example, 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 the affected areas, we envision a simple and economic solution through our 2011 iGEM project: VitaYeast. The goal of VitaYeast is to implement vitamin and mineral production pathways in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, or 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 stables in the world: bread. We foresee the VitaYeast as a cheap and elegant way to supplement the diets of those who live in impoverished communities where food is produced in limited quantities.
To aid genetic engineering in yeast, we plan to develop a set BioBrick tools for the yeast chassis. While iGEM has a many well characterized promoters, vectors and termination sequences for E. Coli, yeast remains a largely untapped resource. By introducing a set of basic parts, including many promoter and termination sequences, we hope to greatly expedite use of yeast chassis in iGEM.
In addition to promoter and termination sequences, we are also BioBricking a library of yeast vectors designed to shuttle designer genes into yeast while conforming to the BioBrick Standard Assembly protocol. The design of these vectors will not only include the appropriate restriction sites, but will also allow the vectors to be produced in E. Coli before being used to manipulate DNA in yeast. This way, we hope to take advantage the propagation speed of E. Coli as well as the production capabilities of Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
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 broaden to animals as the technology advances and as natural resources depletes over the years. Therefore, in addition to wet lab experiments, we want to survey the opinions of the iGEM community on synthetic biology in food resourcing. We believe that our study will have far-reaching implication as the society is increasingly forced to turn to genetic engineering to deal with growing global demands on existing food supplies.
