Barbara Halkier receives grant from Novo Nordic Foundation
Head of DynaMo, Professor Barbara Ann Halkier has received DKK 2.700.000 for her project “Optimized microbial production of the health-promoting glucoraphanin” by the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s Committee on Biotechnology-based Synthesis and Production Research.
The project addresses the fundamental challenge in synthetic biology related to engineering of compartmentalized pathways using the glucoraphanin pathway as case study.
Glucoraphanin is the glucosinolate associated with broccoli’s health-promoting effects. In planta, the glucoraphanin pathway is compartmentalized between the chloroplast and the cytosol. This project will apply a novel strategy of un-compartmentalization of a compartmentalized pathway and investigate in parallel the ability of the cytosolic microenvironments of a prokaryote (E. coli) and a eukaryote (S. cerevisiae) with the aim of eshtablishing an optimized microbial host for glucoraphanin production.
The grant is 2.7 mill kr and the project period 3 years.