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BIT 480 Yeast Metabolic Engineering
Participants will be introduced to a variety of methods for using yeast to produce commercially relevant products. Topics will 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 will be discussed. Students will apply gene manipulation approaches to engineer Saccharomyces cerevisiae to produce beta-carotene and/or other relevant biotechnology products. This will be accomplished by assembling a series of optimized genes in the biosynthetic pathway using the versatile genetic assembly system (VEGAS) that exploits the capacity of Saccharomyces cerevisiae to join sequences with terminal homology by homologous recombination. 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.
Typically offered in Spring only