Team:INSA-Lyon/Project/Stage2/Strategy/storagelipids

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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. (I0500). We use the plasmids BBa_K274220 and BBa_K274120.


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.

The properties that their structure confers to the molecule could explain that carotenoids cannot enter into the granules, but if our hypothesis is borne out, we have good hope that smaller carbon chains as DHA and EPA would be stored into the granules as well.

In order to realize this experiment, we co-transformed a pili1 plasmid and one with the lycopene plasmid and the other with the beta carotene plasmid.