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Team:Harvard/flavor
From 2010.igem.org
abstract
As flavor and scent are the senses directly associated with food, they help to shape one's attitude towards specific fruits and vegetables. If the smell or flavor of an undesirable but healthy food can be altered, perhaps we can create a nutritious food that more people will want to eat! To approach this problem, Team Flavor chose to express novel proteins and pathways in Arabidopsis that would change the plant's taste and smell. Obviously Arabidopsis is not a commonly consumed food, but the project serves as proof that our goals are workable. The team chose to focus on two proteins that alter taste - Miraculin and Brazzein - and two pathways that alter scent - wintergreen (mint) and valencene (orange/citrus).
Miraculin is a protein derived from the plant Synsepalum dulcificum and works by binding taste receptors, causing sour foods to taste sweet. Brazzein is a sweetener derived from the West African fruit of the plant Oubli; it is more potent than sugar or even other natural sweeteners. Both proteins can be easily extracted from their native sources and directly expressed within Arabidopsis.
The scents of both wintergreen and valencene require the derivation of particular molecules from chemical compounds that naturally exist within the plant. The wintergreen scent comes from expression of methyl salicylate, an organic ester naturally found in many plants. Using BioBrick parts created by the 2006 MIT iGEM team, we aimed to install a pathway in Arabidopsis that produces methyl salicylate from a precursor called chorismate, using 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.
