What is Yeast Metabolic Engineering?

What is Yeast Metabolic Engineering?

In this course, participants are introduced to a variety of methods for using yeast to produce commercially relevant products. Topics include cultivation, genetic manipulation to delete or replace genes, transformation, heterologous gene expression and codon optimization/gene synthesis. Various modern molecular cloning approaches and computational resources are discussed. Students apply gene manipulation approaches to engineer Saccharomyces cerevisiae to produce beta-carotene and/or other relevant biotechnology products. This is accomplished by assembling a series of optimized genes in the biosynthetic pathway using the versatile genetic assembly system (VEGAS, Mitchell et al. 2015) that exploits the capacity of Saccharomyces cerevisiae to join sequences with terminal homology by homologous recombination. The expression will be compared by assembling libraries of transcriptional units with different promoters and using different genetic knock-outs as hosts. Additionally, computational modeling of metabolic processes will be used to assess perturbations to metabolic fluxes.

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