Team:Hendrix Arkansas/Project

Using synthetic biology to engineer a visible alkane-detecting strain of Yarrowia lipolytica yeast

This summer, Hendrix College entered the first Arkansas team to compete in the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition (iGEM). iGEM is an undergraduate synthetic biology competition, which is dedicated to education and competition, advancement of synthetic biology, and the development of open community and collaboration. The overall goal of our project is to engineer a biological machine that can detect cancer. Skin cancers, such as melanoma, are known to give off volatile compounds that can be detected by trained dogs. The volatile compounds given off by cancer cells include several alkanes. The purpose of our experiment is to engineer a strain of Yarrowia lipolytica that is capable of detecting and growing on alkanes to turn color in the presence of these volatile compounds. It is our hope that we can use this yeast to cheaply and non-invasively (perhaps in a cancer detecting band-aid) to detect melanoma. In order to achieve our goal, we will build a reporter construct that uses an alkane sensitive promoter to drive the expression of a blue chromoprotein from the coral Acropora millepora. This construct should cause the yeast to turn blue in the presence of alkanes. We first want to test the ability of the blue chromoprotein to be expressed in yeast cells, so we have generated an expression vector to express the gene in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. We have also obtained a sample of Yarrowia lipolytica and are in the process of generating the parts required to build the reporter construct. These parts include an alkane response element (3xARE1), a leu minimal promoter, our reporter gene (blue chromoprotein), and a terminator (XPR2). Once the reporter construct is constructed, we will clone it into a Yarrowia lipolytica expression vector and integrate it into the yeast. If our experiment is successful, our cancer detecting band-aid could allow for easier and earlier detection of melanoma.