Team:Paris Bettencourt

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.