Team:UGA-Georgia/Geraniol

Geraniol

What is Geraniol?

Geraniol is a 10-carbon monoterpene-alcohol naturally occurring in plants such as rose and lemongrass. Due to its rose-like scent, it has a long history of usage approved by FDA in the fragrance and food industry. In recent years, potential usages of geraniol start expanding to biofuel, organic insect repellent and tumor suppressor. Currently, geraniol is commercially available through extraction mainly from plants. However, it is an inefficient model for geraniol production, as geraniol represents only a small portion of the plant biomass.

Why Geraniol?

When UGA-iGEM begun, we had the opportunity to work with the methanogenic arhcaeon, Methanococcus maripaludis, and after reading through the literature we were able to develop this project where we may open doors towards greater sustainability in biofuel production at drastically reduced costs. We chose geraniol in particular because of the two central points when designing this project: 1) Geraniol has a growing number of applications like those mentioned below (list 1), and 2) Methanococcus maripaludis naturally synthesizes the immediately prior intermediate, geranyl-pyrophoshphate, which is catalyzed into geraniol and iPP by the enzyme geraniol synthase (figure 2).