Team:Valencia/Project

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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, thermogenine, to produce heat. This process would be really useful in many industrial applications and even daily routine actions. Thermogenine is a mitochondrial membrane protein that dissipates proton gradient in heat.

We are using Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains kindly handed over by [http://www.cbm.uam.es/mitolab/fichapersonal.aspx?idpersona=6|Dr. Eduardo Rial]. Besides, we have built our own calorimeters so as to record the temperature differences.

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