Team:INSA-Lyon/Project/Stage2/Strategy/storagelipids
From 2010.igem.org
Storage lipids
Many lipids are nowadays well-known to be very useful for health as DHA and EPA.
Granules are inclusion bodies of PHB and then a storage lipids drop.
We wanted to test the hypothesis: if there are overproduced lipids inside the bacteria, they would be stored inside the PHB granules.It is less demanding for the bacteria, from an energetic point of view, to store it inside the PHB granules than to create another specific inclusion body.
B-carotene (red-orange) and lycopene(red) are carotenoids pigments which are made of 40 carbons with isoprene units. Then we can observe the position of those proteins into the bacteria, thanks to the pigment coloration. Moreover, those parts are already ligate as composite parts in the registry under the control of the pBad/araC promoter which is induced by arabinose.
Beta-carotenes and lycopenes are molecules chemically really different from the PHB.
The first are long carbon chain with isoprene units ( polyisoprenes) whereas PHB are polyesters.