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From 2013hs.igem.org

Welcome to CAPS

Biofuels
The international oil industry drives our economy and very life of the world. However, this resource is dwindling and has detrimental effects on our atmosphere. In order to reduce oil usage and dependence, we will improve the efficiency of bio-fuels by manipulating the microbes used in their creation. One of the proposed biofuels is using alkanes to make biodiesel. They are useful because they float when the cell lysed and only needs to be dewatered. One way to produce alkanes is through Acetyl-CoA. Acetyl-CoA is synthesized by pyruvate. Pyruvate kinase converts phosphoenolpyruvate (PEP) into pyruvate. Pyruvate kinase adds a phosphate group from PEP to ADP to yield ATP and pyruvate.

Our iGEM project this year is to overexpress pyruvate kinase in cyanobacteria. To do this, we will insert a hyperactive pyruvate kinase from a rabbit muscle, yeast, or mutant cyanobacteria. This will increase the production of PEP greatly within the cyanobacteria. The excess PEP will then be used in the production of alkanes. Then, we will place the cyanobacteria in a low oxygen environment which will further suppress the usage of energy by limiting the electron transport chain. This energy would then be passed to the production of alkanes. Testing will be done with lipid extraction and profiling assay.

Official Team Profile

Contents 1 Team 2 Project 3 Results/Conclusions 4 Safety 5 Attributions 6 Human Practices 7 Fun

Team

Blue Valley Center of Advanced Professional Studies (CAPS) is an outreach facility for students who wish to achieve higher goals and expectations in a professional environment. The team is composed of students from the Blue Valley district high schools giving us an array of students with different backgrounds and abilities.

Click here to see our team members.

Project

Click here to see the monthly lab notebooks.

Results/Conclusions

What did you achieve over the course of your semester?

Safety

What safety precautions did your team take? Did you take a safety training course? Were you supervised at all times in the lab?

Attributions

Who worked on what?

Human Practices

What impact does/will your project have on the public?

Fun

Isn't Reading Quite Fun?

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4] The path to next generation biofuels: successes and challenges in the era of synthetic biology by Clementina Dellomonaco, Fabio Fava, Ramon Gonzalez

[5] Advanced biofuel production in microbes

[6] Metabolic Engineering of Hydrocarbon Biosynthesis for Biofuel Production

[7] Genetic Engineering of Algae for Enhanced Biofuel Production

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