Team:Paris Bettencourt

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@iGEM_Paris

Body malodor has been a problem for humans engaging in social interactions throughout history and is caused by skin bacteria metabolizing sweat into odorant compounds. Currently, people can either mask body odor with perfumes or by preventing sweat using an antiperspirant.

The iGEM Paris Bettencourt 2014 team aims to provide a natural way to end body malodor using Synthetic Biology. Currently, there are four ongoing projects targeting armpit, foot, fish, as well as age-related body odor. The techniques used to eliminate the odor for each case will involve replacing malodorous bacteria with non-malodor producing bacteria. The team is also using bacteria to produce a smell database, where primary odors could be combined in bacteria to produce novel smells. The results of this project could go a long way towards eliminating body odor and helping people to smell just like themselves.

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Bacteria processing sweat is the primary cause of body odor. Our project aims to study the bacteria involved in the creation of malodorant compounds and try to find natural variant that are odorless. The final goal would be to create a probiotic cosmetic.

Here we present the design of an odour palette. It is composed of BioBricks containing coding sequences for different enzymes known to catalyse reactions that yield volatile compounds with characteristic smells. We included smells with different tonalities such in order to explore the resulting aromas from different combinations of smelly units.

2-nonenal is a compound, with very specific strong odor perceived as iris, fat, and cucumber, which rate increases with age. Our goal is to study relationship between human skin bacteria and 2-nonenal.

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, by the enzyme TMM (trimethylamine monooxygenase).

Isovaleric acid is a compound produced by B. subtilis through leucine degradation pathway, which is hypothesized to be responsible for the foot odor (cheese smell.) Our project aims at validating this hypothesis with the aid of both invitro and insitu experimentation's.

ART GALLERY

Centre for Research and Interdisciplinarity (CRI)
Faculty of Medicine Cochin Port-Royal, South wing, 2nd floor
Paris Descartes University
24, rue du Faubourg Saint Jacques
75014 Paris, France

+33 1 44 41 25 22/25

paris-bettencourt-igem@googlegroups.com