"

From 2014hs.igem.org

Lambert_GA iGEM HomePage

Lambert high school’s iGem team is working with a chitosan based antimicrobial that stops fungi and bacteria from proliferating. Chitosan is currently produced with a chemically intensive process that doesn't always create the correct type of chitosan needed for specific applications. Chitosan is a deacetylated form of chitin, a very common organic compound found in cell walls. Chitosan is naturally produced in many organisms. This is due to the protein chitin deacetylase (CDA) which removes acetyl groups 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 thereby capturing the natural conversion process and creating an engineered cell machine to produce CDA. Several advantages of producing chitosan using our "Chitinite" cells include the ability to fine tune the percent and potentially pattern of deacytleation as well as using a biologically produced chitosan rather than the current industrial methods of strong acids and bases. The end goal of our project is to create a topical spray that was naturally produced to treat post harvest fruit and vegetables in order to prevent microbial caused spoilage. Lambert iGem is also planning on submitting a BioBrick of the CDA gene to the parts registry.