Team:NYU New York
New York University
Flavonoids, a large group of plant compounds, have broad applications ranging from therapeutics and food industry to dyes and cosmetics. Established methods for flavonoid production in industry involve plant extraction or organic chemical synthesis, resulting in high costs and massive amounts of environmentally-toxic substances. The global flavonoids market is projected to reach $1.06 billion by 2025, providing motivation for novel methods of flavonoid synthesis.
NYU iGEM aims to metabolically engineer pathways for recombinant flavonoid production in to virtually eliminate waste and synthesize flavonoids more efficiently. Central to our synthesis methods is the use of optogenetic gene regulation; optogenetics has recently been validated as a viable method for efficient metabolic engineering.
Due to the breadth of flavonoids produced from naringenin, metabolic pathways can be combined and edited to produce a wide array of commercially relevant products. The team has validated the production of naringenin and is working to produce flavonoids using a bioreactor that we built ourselves. The results of this work may be applicable to the global flavonoids market as a viable alternative to current methods of production.
Our Wiki
Unlike many other teams, our wiki is 100% mobile-friendly. You can experience our wiki on any and all of your devices. We noticed that most teams don’t take other devices into account at all. In fact, the pages of some of the recent winners of the “Best Wiki” award became completely unreadable on any device other than a computer. In a time when smartphones have become part of everyday life for people around the world, a poor user-experience on mobile devices is simply unacceptable. That’s why we took care in implementing the principles of Responsive Web Design in our wiki. You can enjoy our content across devices of any size.
Who are we?
NYU iGEM is a first year team made up of undergraduate students with multidimensional skill sets who are united by a passion for cutting-edge science and engineering. This is our first endeavor into the world of Synthetic Biology and we don’t plan on it being our last.
