Team:FAFU-CHINA/Description

Description

Inspiration

When it comes to fragrance, we immediately think of fragrant plants, such as flowers, but they don't bloom all year round. In the age of the Internet, it's easy to see a flower, but not so easy to smell it. So, we were thinking about a question, how do you smell a flower anytime, anywhere?

The secret of aroma

The biochemical pathways that produce aromas are not unique to plants; they may be just one or two enzymes at the end of the pathways. By heterologous expression of these enzymes in microorganisms, it is possible to make them produce flavoring substances at anytime and anywhere.

According to literatures, we found the MVA pathway in yeast, and yeast enrichment of IPP and DMAPP can be realized by overexpressing rate-limiting enzymes in some pathways. With these two precursors, we only need to heterologous express one or two related genes in plants to be able to use yeast to produce floral fragrances.

[1]Zhang Y, Wang J, Cao X, Liu W, Yu H, Ye L. High-level production of linalool by engineered Saccharomyces cerevisiae harboring dual mevalonate pathways in mitochondria and cytoplasm. Enzyme Microb Technol. 2020 Mar;134:109462.

The idea of microbial aroma production system

Simply getting microbes to churn out a single variety of fragrances might have the same effect as holding a bottle of essential oil up your nose and inhaling it. Flowers, like perfumes, are carefully prepared by plants using a variety of aromatic substances. Only let microorganism express the variety of fragrance material diversification at the same time by the corresponding regulation and control, in order to truly achieve microorganism to produce fragrance.

Microbial incense-producing night light imagination

In 2019, a company called sensorwake hopes to wake up users through a combination of odor and sound and light. Users can choose to wake up their own odor every day by replacing the filter, including mint, biscuits, orange juice,Toast and so on. This invention pointed out the direction for the production practice of our project.

We want to make a night light with automatic scent change, allowing users to change the scent produced by microorganisms by using the night light. The night light can produce two different scents when turned on and off, that is, one scent during the day and the other at night.

Using synthetic biology and photogenetics, we constructed different light control systems in S. cerevisiae and E. coli, respectively, and inoculated them into specially designed medium for co-culture. The automatic change of flavor was realized by alternating light and dark induction.