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From 2014hs.igem.org

Lambert_GA iGEM HomePage

Lambert high school’s iGem team is working with a chitosan based anti-fungal that stops fungi from feeding off the saccharides on the surface, and inside the fruit, which causes rotting. The chitosan, has proven harder to biologically produce. It is currently produced with chemical intensive process that doesn't always create the correct type of chitosan. Chitosan is a deacetylated form of chitin, a very common organic compound found in cell walls. Chitosan is naturally produced in nature as a food source for many organisms. This is due to the protein chitin deacetylase (CDA) which removes an acetyl group from chitin. Our goals is to extract the CDA gene from the organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a very well-known strain of yeast, and express it in E. coli to mass produce the enzyme and create chitosan. Lambert iGem is also planning on creating a BioBrick of the CDA gene for future implications.