--
-- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups DIYbio group. To post to this group, send email to diy...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to diybio+un...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at https://groups.google.com/d/forum/diybio?hl=en
Learn more at www.diybio.org
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "DIYbio" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to diybio+un...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/diybio/e5ba56c9-e575-46ce-9b55-caec693bc955o%40googlegroups.com.
--
-- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups DIYbio group. To post to this group, send email to diy...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to diybio+un...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at https://groups.google.com/d/forum/diybio?hl=en
Learn more at www.diybio.org
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "DIYbio" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to diybio+un...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/diybio/f7e80485-1080-4ab0-ae13-243e9462f846n%40googlegroups.com.
I know you are interested in finding economically attractive targets to synthesize, so I wanted to provide links for a few resources that the government has published where they analyze what chemicals are most attractive to be produced biotechnologically:
The caveat to these is that these chemicals would need to be produced at scale, so maybe not the type of target that you need.
The margin on a biotech product tends to be proportional to the difficulty it is to synthesize and inversely proportional to the volume that can be produced. Biological therapeutics are low volume/high margin but there's a lot of regulations around this space. Something I haven't looked too much into but I know the margins are good and the regulatory regime much softer is the Flavors and Fragrances (F&F) industry, especially for fragrances.
One idea I had would be to produce the active ingredients in saffron, the most prominent of which is safranal - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safranal
Saffron is currently painstakingly harvested from wild-growing flowers and has very low yield which results in a very high price. Check out the following video - Why Saffron Is The World's Most Expensive Spice
You would need to figure out what subset of the compounds that the saffron plant makes that you would need to make to recapitulate the flavor profile, but this can often be surprisingly few of the hundreds of compounds a plan makes. Researchers associated with Jay Keasling found they could make a delicious hoppy beer using no hops by having the brewing yeast make just two (I think) of the natural oils that the hop plant makes - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03293-x
My (not current) understanding is that there's a bit of a hop shortage world-wide, could be an opportunity to recreate different hop flavors by having the yeast make their most important chemical components during the brewing process…
In terms of really cool software tools you could develop, the first big idea I came up with would be a single software package or web interface that made it very easy to collect data from disparate biological databases to answer the types of questions a bioengineer might have such as:
Also an amazing thing would be enabling better natural language searching of the primary literature. Right now you have to know what keywords you are looking for and go through lots of papers to find relevant information. Being able to query something like, "What gene expression changes happen when yeast is placed in a hyperosmotic solution?" and get papers that focus on that question would be so helpful.