2017: Psicose
The World Health Organisation recognized obesity as a serious illness so we decided to consider ways to combat its spread and effects. This is how we came across D-Psicose, which is a non-toxic rare sugar and a sweetener with several measurable health effects. Currently, its industrial production is based on purification from organic matter or on epimerization of more common sugars but it remains difficult and expensive. To improve the bioproduction process, we decided to construct a biosensor to screen the best epimerase for the conversion of Fructose into Psicose and corroborate the fluorescence quantifications with HPLC measurements. To be efficient any bioproduction process requires screening of the most efficient enzyme(s). We are bringing to iGEM a new enzyme screening process based on biosensors, which, in the presence of the compound of interest, emit a fluorescent signal and can be used to identify the enzyme that gives the optimal production.
For more infos, visit our WIKI and/or look at our POSTER.
Rewards
Gold Medal
The 2017 iGEM competition
In 2017, 312 team from 44 countries participated at the competition and more than 3000 people attended the Giant Jamboree that was held at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, MA, USA from 9th to 13th of November 2017. Full infos and results are available on the iGEM 2017 website.
After iGEM
After the Jamboree, we have performed additional experiments first in vivo the in vitro and, together with the results obtained during the iGEM competition, we have prepared two scientific articles that has been published in international peer-reviewed journals:
Armetta J, Berthome R, Cros A, Pophillat C, Colombo BM, Pandi A, Grigoras I. Biosensor-based enzyme engineering approach applied to psicose biosynthesis. Synthetic Biology (Oxford) (2019) 4, ysz028. doi: 10.1093/synbio/ysz028
Pandi A, Grigoras I, Borkowski O, Faulon JL. Optimizing cell-free biosensors to monitor enzymatic production. ACS Synthetic Biology (2019) 8, 1952-1957. doi: 10.1021/acssynbio.9b00160