Curcumin is a natural compound extracted from zingiberaceae, which has attracted worldwide attention because of its antioxidant, anticancer and mildew-proof functions.
At present, the method of extracting curcumin from plants is squeezing and dissolving, which consumes a lot of energy. The output produced in this way is far from meeting the market demand as well.
Therefore, our project imagine using Escherichia coli to produce curcumin. We cloned these two genes from Arabidopsis thaliana into a plasmid. We also fused and cloned the other two genes from Zingiber officinale chalcone synthase and Curcuma longa into another plasmid.
After transformation and induced expression, the construction of engineering Escherichia coli was completed, which made it have the ability to synthesize curcumin.
We've also designed a quorum sensing system that can regulate the expression of genes related to curcumin synthesis, alleviating curcumin's inhibition of early bacterial count.
In terms of hardware and modeling, we predicted the possible structure of proteins after gene fusion expression by AlphaFold2 and homology modeling.
In addition, to predict the impact of changes in substrate and intermediate metabolites on curcumin, we constructed an ODE model based on the metabolic network.
In summary, we provide an efficient and low-cost synthetic biological method for curcumin production.
We aimed at promoting its application in more fields such as biochrome pigments, health care products, pharmaceutical materials, food colouring additives and so on.
