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Team:Harvard/flavor
From 2010.igem.org
abstract
As flavor is the first sense you associate with food, it is flavor that shapes our attitude and fondness towards different fruits and vegetables. For this reasons, the Team Flavor aspect of the iGarden project is to introduce new tastes and smells into the arabidopsis plant by expression of new proteins and pathways. In particular, we have two proteins to alter taste, Miraculin and Brazzein, and two pathways to express scent: wintergreen (mint) and valencene (orange/citrus).
Miraculin is a protein derived from Miracle Berries, and works through binding taste receptors and resulting in ‘sour’ tastes to seem ‘sweet.’ Brazzein is a natural sweetener that is much more potent that sugar or even other natural sweeteners. Both of the proteins can be directly expressed within the plant.
The scents of both Wintergreen and Valencene require the derivation of particular molecules from existing chemical compounds already within the plant. For the wintergreen pathway, the desired scent comes from the compound Methyl Salicylate. BioBrick parts from the MIT 2006 iGEM team are used in a two-step process to change Chorismate to Methyl Salicylate, requiring three separate enzymes.
The orange-citrus smell requires only a single gene, found in Valencia oranges. The gene is extracted from the orange and then directly expressed in the plants in the same manner as Miraculin and Brazzein.
