"
Team:Uppsala-Sweden/Project
From 2009.igem.org
booze bugs
Goal
To introduce ethanol producing capability into a cyanobacteria using the biobrick system.
Introduction
The world today is heading towards an energy crisis. This makes the need for novel ways to produce fuels in high yeilds a nessesity. The main renewable source of energy we know of is the sun, and because of this our team chose to try toharvest this energy through the photsynthetic capability of cyano bacteria. Ethanol has been used as an energy source for decades and the means of using it are highly developed. If we could store the suns energy as ethanol, it could then be used in many different processes.
How to
Cyano bacteria have the capability to harvest the energy from the sun and convert it into other forms of energy. The natural way for these organisms is to store it as sugars or other carbohydrates in a way similar to plants. By introducing a casette of genes for ethanol production, we could get a cyano bacteria to start producing ethanol. However the yield from this might be very low since the bacteria have already evolved good pathways in the metabolism to take care of the energy. The source of carbon for the ethanol is pyruvate which is also used in the krebs cycle. To get a higher yield the pyruvate pool must be large enough for the ethanol anabolism. By blocking the pyruvate dehydrogenase the usage of pyruvate in the Krebs cycle can be reduced and the pyruvate used for ethanol production instead.
