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Can you imagine that the violet is a so-called “silent” flower. In the fragrant sense of the word, this means that its fragrance is very difficult to capture, unless you squeeze astronomical quantities of this fragile winter flower rather complicated to grow in quantity. “A violet accord is often obtained from petrochemical products”, therefore not really green, underlines Camille Pin, a master’s student in biotechnology at
Paul-Sabatier University of Toulouse (UPS).
It is one of the six students– two from the UPS and four from
INSA – who sacrifice their summer vacation, preferring the white coat to the swimsuit, the laboratory bench to the beach, to align with
iGEM*, the prestigious global synthetic biology competition created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston but whose final is to take place for the first time in November in Paris.
Yeasts and bacteria
This year, after the second place in the world acquired by the Toulouse residents in 2020 thanks to their super-yeasts for astronauts, the local team is under pressure. Doubly even, since it attacks the emblematic flower of Ville Rose. Their Elixio project consists of producing, and enclosing in bottles, sustainable fragrances of violet.
As is often the case with iGem’s competitors, the students work on the basis of a yeast whose DNA they are “programming” to reproduce the scent of the violet. They associated it with a cyanobacterium that only uses light and CO2. The two organisms feed on each other.
In addition to this, you need to know more about it.
So, did the iGEM Toulouse 2021 team have a nose? Answer in November in Paris, after a studious summer.
* International Genetically Engineered Machine
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