Synthetic biology can be used in industrial biotechnology to engineer metabolic pathways to create high-value chemicals using model microorganisms such as yeast. During the Synthetic Biology in Action course, participants engineered yeast to produce beta-caretone for industrial biotechnology purposes. In this talk, they describe the steps they took to engineer an existing yeast pathway to produce the new chemical. These steps include modeling the metabolic pathway outputs, DNA design, amplification, and assembly, and analysis of the final result.
This course is an advanced treatment of biochemical mechanisms that underlie biological processes. Topics include macromolecular machines such as the ribosome, the proteasome, fatty acid synthases as a paradigm for polyketide synthases and non-ribosomal polypeptide synthases, and polymerases. Emphasis will be given to the experimental methods used to unravel how these processes fit into the cellular context as well as the coordinated regulation of these processes.
Introduction to the basic principles of chemical biology: structures and reactivity; chemical mechanisms of enzyme catalysis; chemistry of signaling, biosynthesis, and metabolic pathways.
Cell biology, biochemistry, genetics, and the biology of organ systems, Covers concepts of building blocks (nucleotides, amino acids, and cells) and of information flow (DNA to proteins, receptors to nuclei, the blood to distant organs, and DNA to offspring)
