Project Description

.

Summary

In our project, we aim to address the environmental and health concerns associated with chemical dyes by exploring new biological colors and increasing the viability of existing chromophores. This initiative could potentially reduce the use of toxic chemicals prevalent in today's dye industry. Our project is divided into two main objectives:

  1. To find novel biological colors from environmental samples of microorganisms.
  2. To improve on a biological color molecule to make it suitable for upscaled production, in this case increasing the maturation speed of a chromoprotein.

The problem - negative consequences of producing chemical dyes

Modern industry utilizes dyes in a wide variety of applications, from textiles to artificial food coloring. Often synthetic in nature, the production and use of the more than 3600 dyes manufactured today uses a lot of toxic and dangerous chemicals (Kant 2012), and use in the textile industry makes it one of the biggest polluters of water (Berradi et al. 2019).

This concern has spurred a renewed interest in safer, biodegradable natural dye sources, which also has uses in food coloring, biochemical methods, and medicine (Ardila-Leal et al. 2021). While natural pigments from plants and animals have been utilized since long before synthetic dyes were invented, they can’t match their synthetic counterparts in terms of the range of colors. Also, they are typically fixed to fabric using toxic substances, which is a problem for them as an environmental option in the dye industry (Kant 2012: Watkins et al. 2024).

With the shortcomings of both these options, biological pigments produced by microorganisms is an appealing option. The nature of microorganisms enables efficient upscaling of production, and utilizing fermentation and biotechnological advances has the potential of achieving cost-effective mass production. Additionally, microbial pigments have been shown to exhibit beneficial heath properties such as being antioxidative and anticarcinogenic. Furthermore, by using well known microorganisms such as E.coli, the ability to modify production for specific areas of application can add another distinct advantage compared to conventional options (Venil et al. 2013).

The discovery and improvement of microbially produced pigments is the start of the process of substituting synthetic dyes and today’s unsustainable practices. Therefore it is an important first step towards making a significant impact on a crucial aspect of modern industry and a healthier, greener future. Further, chromoproteins have a utility in research today, where they are used as gene reporters (Liljeruhm et al. 2018). This is a field we, by increasing the number of available chromoproteins, might have a more direct impact on.

Project goals - bioprospecting for colors

To produce new biological colors suitable for large-scale production, we will focus on two objectives:

  1. We will attempt to extract new chromoproteins and pigments from a selection of colorful bacteria supplied by the Brandis lab at Uppsala University, which they sampled from various places in Europe. Aside from hopefully identifying new chromoproteins, which we in this project define as any colored proteins, this part of the project will also act as a guideline for how identification of chromoproteins or pigment synthesizing enzymes can be done. We will develop a pipeline heavily dependent on bioinformatic searches utilizing the genome and other types of data attained in the lab to identify candidate genes, with the goal of developing an easier and more cost-effective way for future teams to explore this area.


  2. Improve upon a known green chromoprotein. This part shows the potential for improving the molecules’ properties to suit specific uses and/or reduce production costs. We chose to work with a known protein since we can’t guarantee that our extraction and identification of novel colors will give positive results within the timeframe of the project. The protein in question is a mutated version of amilCP first made by the Sydney 2016 iGEM team, then worked on by Liljeruhm et al. (2018) to identify the single mutation responsible. The green color of this protein is relatively uncommon among chromoproteins, but the protein takes a long time to mature and is therefore not suitable for upscaled production. We will attempt to alter the protein to mitigate this issue, and produce a new biobrick. The editing will be heavily based on modeling and AI tools to suggest amino acid targets affecting maturation speed.

Why we chose this project

The inspiration came from a research group at Uppsala University, when they presented early findings from a project that involved cultivating over 400 bacteria and fungi from environmental samples, taken from several places across Europe. Many of the resulting colonies had strong colors, and this was suggested as a new topic of study. Biological colors has been worked on by over a dozen previous iGEM teams for different purposes, of which the following show off the variation in possible uses:

Knowing about the environmental challenges faced by industries using conventional dyes, and that there’s many other potential uses of new pigments, biological colors have many innovative uses and can be optimized to be beautiful, functional, and kind to our planet. By exploring the extraction and enhancement of novel biological colors, we saw an opportunity to take the first steps towards future solutions for these problems.

References

Ardila-Leal LD, Poutou-Piñales RA, Pedroza-Rodríguez AM, Quevedo-Hidalgo BE. 2021. A Brief History of Colour, the Environmental Impact of Synthetic Dyes and Removal by Using Laccases. Molecules 26: 3813.

Berradi M, Hsissou R, Khudhair M, Assouag M, Cherkaoui O, El Bachiri A, El Harfi A. 2019. Textile finishing dyes and their impact on aquatic environs. Heliyon 5: e02711.

Kant, R. 2012. Textile dyeing industry an environmental hazard. Natural Science, 4, 22-26. doi 10.4236/ns.2012.41004.

Liljeruhm J, Funk SK, Tietscher S, Edlund AD, Jamal S, Wistrand-Yuen P, Dyrhage K, Gynnå A, Ivermark K, Lövgren J, Törnblom V, Virtanen A, Lundin ER, Wistrand-Yuen E, Forster AC. 2018. Engineering a palette of eukaryotic chromoproteins for bacterial synthetic biology. Journal of Biological Engineering, doi https://doi.org/10.1186/s13036-018-0100-0.

Venil, CK, Zakaria, ZA, Ahmad, VA. 2013. Bacterial pigments and their applications. Process Biochemistry, doi https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procbio.2013.06.006.

Watkins T, Moffitt K, Speight RE, Navone L. 2024. Chromogenic fusion proteins as alternative textiles dyes. Biotechnology and bioengineering, doi https://doi.org/10.1002/bit.28772.