Wow! Great work. This was literally something I was interested for the same reasons LOL. You might be interested in a class called CHEN 4803 Metabolic Engineering in the Chemical and Biological Engineering Department, since it treats similar material. Do you think the soybean is a good expression organism for something like bovine casein? Or would something like yeast or E. coli be better? And is casein the only essential component for milk, or would we also need other things, like lipids and other proteins?
So as far as plasmid preparation and synthesis goes, E. coli or yeast could be used. E.coli has been extremely well characterized, so its great for genetic manipulation. But these bacteria/simple cells wouldn’t be too good at translating mammalian proteins. Soy isn’t necessarily the best at translating mammalian proteins either, so we had to compensate for this by optimizing the DNA codons for soy bean ribosomes- which results in an altered DNA and mRNA from cow milk but the exact same amino acid sequence. For your second question… NO!. this is really just the very beginning of the project. A proof of concept if you will. But to achieve genuine cow milk from protein this would have to be repeated for the Whey proteins and other proteins. Where it gets funky though would be engineering the biological pathways to assemble the fatty acids. CHEN 4803 sounds super cool by the way, wish I knew about that class earlier.
If this works, you mentioned vacuuming the proteins out of the soybeans. How would this work, and would this process actually damage the soybean or would it be able to sustain multiple rounds of extraction?
Was the soybean assigned for the synthetic biology course or how was this plant chosen? Why was E.Coli the intermediate step?
Can you tell us a little more about how you knew which proteins account for the largest component of taste and texture with the milk? What are other potential targets for future work?
curesymposium.org 
Wow! Great work. This was literally something I was interested for the same reasons LOL. You might be interested in a class called CHEN 4803 Metabolic Engineering in the Chemical and Biological Engineering Department, since it treats similar material. Do you think the soybean is a good expression organism for something like bovine casein? Or would something like yeast or E. coli be better? And is casein the only essential component for milk, or would we also need other things, like lipids and other proteins?
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So as far as plasmid preparation and synthesis goes, E. coli or yeast could be used. E.coli has been extremely well characterized, so its great for genetic manipulation. But these bacteria/simple cells wouldn’t be too good at translating mammalian proteins. Soy isn’t necessarily the best at translating mammalian proteins either, so we had to compensate for this by optimizing the DNA codons for soy bean ribosomes- which results in an altered DNA and mRNA from cow milk but the exact same amino acid sequence. For your second question… NO!. this is really just the very beginning of the project. A proof of concept if you will. But to achieve genuine cow milk from protein this would have to be repeated for the Whey proteins and other proteins. Where it gets funky though would be engineering the biological pathways to assemble the fatty acids. CHEN 4803 sounds super cool by the way, wish I knew about that class earlier.
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If this works, you mentioned vacuuming the proteins out of the soybeans. How would this work, and would this process actually damage the soybean or would it be able to sustain multiple rounds of extraction?
LikeLike
Excellent explanation of your work!
Was the soybean assigned for the synthetic biology course or how was this plant chosen? Why was E.Coli the intermediate step?
Can you tell us a little more about how you knew which proteins account for the largest component of taste and texture with the milk? What are other potential targets for future work?
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