Team:Pitt/Skin Probiotic/Melanin/Intro

Melanin Intro

We aimed to engineer P. acnes living on the skin to produce melanin with the goal of engineering the bacteria to serve as a living sunscreen for UV protection and to potentially confer a skin tan. Melanin is naturally produced on the skin by melanocytes and is packaged into granules in melanosomes and then transferred to other skin cells such as keratinocytes. The biosynthesis of melanin takes place over a series of biochemical steps. Recently the iGEM team from Tokyo cloned the enzyme MelA that leads to conversion of L-tyrosine into melanin. They showed that this gene can very efficiently produce melanin in E. coli expressing this gene. (Link: http://parts.igem.org/Part:BBa_K193602) Thus we sought to clone this gene into a P. acnes gene vector and requested the Biobricks encoding MelA Part: BBa_K193602.

Figure 1. Melanin production on skin.

Figure. Melanin protein generator for expression in P. acnes.

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