Team:Valencia/Project

Heat is vital for life. Many living forms are unable to maintain its temperature in an adequate range; while others keep it constant using several biochemical mechanisms. We thought it would be really interesting to implement some of these biological tools in an organism that we could easily control.

Using yeast as our model, we aim to be able to express a common mammal protein, thermogenin, to produce heat. This process would be really useful in many industrial applications and even daily routine actions. Thermogenin is a mitochondrial membrane protein that dissipates proton gradient in heat.

We are using Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains kindly handed over by Dr. Eduardo Rial. Besides, we have built our own calorimeters so as to record temperature differences.

In a later stage, we expect to control these temperature differences to optimize the possible applications. Consequently, we will implement a regulatory system for the thermogenin gene expression.

Watch out for news from our project!

How thermogenin works

UCP1, also known as thermogenin, is an uncoupling protein found in the mitochondria of brown adipose tissue. This protein plays an important role in hibernating mammals and in human infants since it is able to generate heat. UCP1 provides an alternative pathway by which protons can reenter the mitochondrial matrix from the intermembrane space, instead of going through ATP synthase. The result is a temperature increase rather than ATP production in the tissue containing this protein family.

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Applications

Maybe some of you are asking yourselves:

Why could be useful a living cell which control its internal temperature?

At first, we just thought this idea would be interesting from the conceptual point of view. Since it includes a protein which uncouples the respiratory electron transport chain, it produces a reduction of the oxygen level and a substitution of energy in the form of ATP by energy in the form of heat. Nevertheless, when our group was running a brainstorming to see how to carry out the project and which could be the possible fields of application for this kind of processes- It occurred to us that:

• You could have a living cell which maintains its temperature among certain levels without the necessity of introducing external heat to the system. Considering that enzymatic activity usually has a strong dependence on the temperature, this system will allow the reduction of electricity costs in an specific reaction.

• Or you could even implement this system in some plants species. If a plant could control its temperature it would allow it to grow in colder climates or to survive frosts.