Probiotic Yeast Engineering

Mazzoni, Gaby; Petrillo, Marina; Tarantino, Kat

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Probiotic Yeast Engineering

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The human gut microbiome contains thousands of microbiota, including yeasts, that supply the body with nutrients and play a large role in the immune system. With advances in microbiology and genetic engineering, researchers are exploring how to engineer the human gut microbiome for better health outcomes. Many different microbes are being investigated, among them yeasts. In this work, we focused on the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae strain KTP because it benefits the human gut microbiome and protects against disease. Previous work has successfully inserted plasmids into S.cerevisiae KTP for fluorescent protein expression. Therefore, we set a goal of using the other efficient genome engineering strategy, homologous recombination, to engineer a metabolic pathway in the strain. We chose the β-carotene pathway because KTP already produces the precursor necessary to produce β-carotene. We were able to clone the pathway, but we found that pathway integration was not successful in S.cerevisiae KTP. Future work could put the pathway on a plasmid or try different approaches to increasing homologous recombination efficiency. Once a successful transformation into S.c. KTP is made, the production of β-carotene could be quantified using HPLC. In summary, this work is an initial step towards metabolic pathway engineering in a probiotic yeast strain, ultimately promising new human health treatments.

This report represents the work of one or more WPI undergraduate students submitted to the faculty as evidence of completion of a degree requirement. WPI routinely publishes these reports on its website without editorial or peer review.

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