Construction of Synthetic Escherichia Coli Producing s-linalool

Abstract

Floral scents are used in many industries and demand for them increases every year. However, the shortage of extracted fragrance supplies from plants leads to high market costs of floral scents. Production of these fragrances from microorganisms is an alternative. In this work we applied the synthetic biology approach to construct a synthetic Escherichia coli system to produce linalool, which is the main component in floral scents. The E. coli system was synthesized in a laboratory by constructing 2 new BioBrick parts, GPPS and LIS Bricks. They were employed to construct GPPS and LIS generator devices by combing them with existing BioBricks from the Registry of BioBrick Standards; i.e., BBa_R0040, BBa_B0030, BBa_B0015. The synthetic E. coli system was created by transforming the generators into a non-scent E. coli YYC912 chassis. The system was tested by culturing synthetic cells in LB medium containing kanamycin and tetramycin. It was found that the synthetic E. coli successfully synthesized linalool and exhibited the strongest linalool scent at 96hours of cultivation. This synthetic cell will be further used as a base strain for future construction of strains that can make higher linalool products for use on the industry level.