[DIYbio] Re: Some ideas for entrepreneurs

I think it's a great idea, and definitely it would be something you could do. In this case you could think of engineering these bugs to overexpress few of the essential genes involved in the metabolic pathway to DHA for example. Or introducig some heterologous genes to boost the yield.

There are two major constraints, they i like to define as "design constraints" in such system:

a) the organisms you'll probably work with will be coming from lab collections, otherwise you'll most likely have to go for an isolation study and to optimize a transformation system to introduce and keep stable the integrated DNA into one of the bugs in there. I talk about integrated DNA as plasmids would probably be lost soon. Integrative approaches are not always straightforward, yes now we have crispr, yet you'll need to find a working promoter and work on expression levels in that case.

b) evolutionary stability aka "why should i produce this?"
Algae have been shaped by the forces of evolution to store lipids in periods of low nitrogen/phosphate and high carbon abundance. After such stressful period they can digest them back and live off their stored energy. If you would express "n" gens in a different host this should match it's metabolism and confer a competitive advantage. This will probably reduce growth speed or resilience of the strain. The risk is tohaving it "washed out" of the gut system, unless it forces to stay through biofilm i guess. Anyway doubling by doubling the chance of mutation rate will accumulate leading one day to a loss-of-phenotype mutant.

So nature is pretty awesome and usually things that we think we could engineer in microbes are already happening somewhere else. Now im thinking: is there a similar bacteria already existing in nature? And can we find a way to introduce it in chickens?

Good idea btw, it's definitely an interesting approach.

Looking forward to see how this evolves.

Best,

Fede