Team:Northeastern Boston/safety
OUR PROJECT
Northeastern is working to standardize protein production in microalgae. Chalmydomonas reinhardtii, the workhorse of algae research, is an attractive chassis for several reasons. Its primary carbon source is CO2, it rapidly divides, and it’s a capable of complex post-translational modifications.
Microalgae are relatively inexpensive to scale, yet have all the production capabilities of other Eukaryotic organisms (di-sulfide bonds, and glycosylation). This capability could be exploited to treat human disease. For example, there was a shortage of an “antibody-cocktail” during the Ebola outbreak. Despite the existence of a promising therapy, existing production methods were too rigid to produce the volume needed to save lives. Northeastern’s iGEM team will investigate the potential of microalgae for therapeutic antibodies and other therapeutics proteins with an emphasis on neglected disease, particularly diseases with known-but-too-expensive treatments.