June

Brainstorming and reading literature about vitamin B12. What organism should we take the pathway from, and what organism should we put it in?

Make Lactobacillus plantarum produce B12
The idea is to make an organism already present in idli (Lactobacillus plantarum) produce vitamin B12. A close cousin of this organism, L. reuteri was thought to produce B12 and had the advantage to have the cobalamin biosynthesis bathway in one single stretch of DNA.


Overexpress the B12 production pathway in Lactobacillus reuteri
The idea is to take an organism already present in idli (Lactobacillus reuteri) and to make it produce even more B12. Its pathway has been studied and we planned to metabolic engineer it as it had already been done in Bacillus megaterium (Biedendieck et al., 2010).
The problem is that L. reuteri actually produces pseudo-cobalamin, which has not been proven to be active in mammals (Santos reference?).
So instead of overproducing a potentially non-active form of cobalamin, we thought of changing the pathway in L. reuteri to make it produce an active form of cobalamin. Unfortunately, due to an apparent difficulty and a lack of knowledge in the community, we dropped this idea.

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July

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References

Biedendieck, R., Malten, M., Barg, H., Bunk, B., Martens, J. H., Deery, E., ... & Jahn, D. (2010). Metabolic engineering of cobalamin (vitamin B12) production in Bacillus megaterium. Microbial biotechnology, 3(1), 24-37.

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