Team:BIT-China/Poster
Poster: BIT-China
Recent years, natural products of plants have attracted dramatically increasing attention as medicines and health products. Among them, Flavonoids, a class of plant secondary metabolites with C6-C3-C6 basic carbon skeleton are well known for their outstanding biological activities, such as, anti-oxidation, anti inflammatory, anti microbial as well as capacity of strengthening immune response.
Eriodictyol , as a natural edible flavonoid mainly derived from lemon fruits has much higher anti-oxidation activity because of its hydroxyl group on the B ring.
At present, flavonoid are mainly extracted from plants by chemical method which is not only low-yield and time-consuming but also requires complicated processes .Therefore, we decided to use fermentation to produce eriodictyol.
In the course of our investigation, we discovered some advantages of flavone. Based on the teacher's research and our understanding of flavone, we chose eriodictyol with high antioxidant properties as the final product. Our project truncates the synthesis pathway of eriodictyol to obtain the product through modular co-culture and increase the yield of the product. Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, only the co-culture experiment of E.coli and S.cerevisiae was carried out. On this basis, we build a model to verify the feasibility of the project. Our goal is constructing a stable co-culture system that can interact with QS system.
The metabolic pathway is from tyrosine to eriodictyol. As an important intermediate, p-coumaric acid connects metabolic pathways in E.coli and S.cerevisiae.
Due to the difference in growth rate and metabolic intensity between E. coli and yeast, we developed a high strength and resource saving quorum sensing system for E. coli. At the same time, a toxic protein system and lactose metabolizing enzyme system controlled by the QS were designed to control the population density of E.coli and the synthesis of products in S.cerevisiae.
So,we formed the characteristic model of our project -- double oscillation dynamic regulation co-culture. It is under the condition that the growth rate of E.coli population oscillates and the expression intensity of upstream and downstream metabolic pathways oscillates, the population density and upstream and downstream metabolic pathways of E.coli and S.cerevisiae were dynamically matched.
This genome-scale metabolic network can be used to quantitatively study the metabolic processes of living organisms, so as to understand the interaction between the components. This metabolic network model does not require complex data such as regulatory information and enzyme kinetics information, but can be modeled based on reaction measurement relations and mass balance equations. We plan to put the established model into MATLAB for calculation and output the results, so as to verify the feasibility of the synthesis approach in the case that experiments cannot be carried out.
In order to better understand the fermentation industry and natural plant compounds involved in our project, we conducted two social practices. For our first practice, we went to CoFCO. In this practice,We visited laboratories in the biotechnology and animal fuel field and saw many advanced instruments and a larger fermentation tank compared with the university laboratory to simulate the fermentation environment of the factory. We also introduced our project and adapted it to their questions.The second time,our team visited a liquorice company in Xinjiang, China. We visited the biological fermentation workshop under construction and visited the licorice of the company. This gives our team a more intuitive understanding of plants such as licorice. In addition, through the exchange with Mr. Miu, the head of the enterprise, we understand that enterprises have a strong interest in the development of high value-added natural products by biological law.
