Team:Paris Bettencourt/Project

Here we present a genetic odor palette. It is built of BioBricks to express enzymes to produce volatile compounds with characteristic smells. We included smells with different tonalities to allow exploration of the "odor space" resulting from combinations of smelly units.

Trimethylaminuria (TMAU) is a rare genetic disease causing a strong fish odor. Our project aims at engineering skin bacteria to degrade trimethylamine, the odor causing molecule, with the enzyme trimethylamine monooxygenase (TMM).

Isovaleric acid, the cheesy component of foot odor, is produced by B. subtilis through the leucine degradation pathway. We characterize a B. subtilis mutant in this pathway, in vitro and in situ (on socks).

Armpit odor comes mainly from aminoacylase enzymes expressed in the genus Corynebacteria. This project is developing CRISPR technology to isolate natural bacterial mutants that lack these enzymes.

2-nonenal is "old people smell," a component of sweat that increases with age. Here we isolate and characterize bacterial species that metabolize 2-nonenal and attenuate its characteristic odor.

Science is beautiful.

Here we mine human microbiome data to survey the frequency and diversity of genes related to body odor. The results suggest specific hotspots for odor gene variation.

All humans have a body odor, but sometimes it is unwanted. Our core projects modify the natural human skin flora to change body odors associated with the armpit, foot, fish odor syndrome, or old age.