Team:UIUC Illinois/Project/Future

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Future Directions

"Biology has atleast 50 more interesting years"

-James Watson, 1986

Environmental Remediation

Waste Matters
Knowing that caffeine could be degraded, we wondered what became of the coffee plants that were used and abused for the world's most socially acceptable drug. Coffee production is no light matter. Large amounts of water go into coffee processing, and subsequently a large amount of waste is developed. "Commercial coffee is obtained from coffee cherries, 6% of which generate the coffee powder whereas the remaining 94% constitute the by- products such as husk, pulp water etc." [3]
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To ameliorate this issue of waste, we looked to different pathways that could prove utile degrading xanthine waste. One organism, Pseudomonas putida CBB1 contained a set of genes that encoded for a caffeine dehydrogenase pathway. Instead of the N-Demethylation characteristic of our aforementioned puppy probiotic operon,
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Yogurt

Let's get cultured.
The final piece to our project aimed at propagating the demethylation proteins in some sort of food vector. We figured making yogurt via Lactobacillus fermentation was our best shot. It is widely known that yogurt is made through fermentation. Species such as Lactobacillus plantarum in yogurt break down lactose and produce lactic acid, the product which gives yogurt it's texture as well as taste. Having the culture that creates the yogurt simultaneously produce assistive proteins seemed like a clear shot to us!