Team:Tec-Monterrey/projectdescription

Production of sugarcane used to be a high profit activity in the Mexican industry. Nonetheless, the increasing demand of high fructose syrup has become a rising threat to most sugar companies. Our project expects to apply synthetic biology to use sugar obtained from sugarcane in an industrial sugar-fructose process, intending to make it simpler and more profitable. The new genetic construct will be able to immobilize invertase by fusing it to bacterial natural membrane protein fragments through a technique for cell surface display. This system will catalyze the transformation of sucrose into fructose directly, without the need of any chemical or mechanical purification process to obtain the enzyme, reducing the amount of unit operations, and cutting production costs. Also, we will use the same principle to immobilize cellulase, converting cellulose from bagasse into useful substrate for biofuel production.