Week 12: Bioproduction

Lab Work!

For this week, the content is in the Lab section– Click here to read: Week 12 Lab: Bioproduction of Beta-Carotene and Lycopene

I liked understanding better how plasmid assembly actually works in practice, because before this, I only understood the theory behind restriction enzymes and cloning workflows
Something interesting was realizing how important backbone selection is, especially checking that restriction enzymes do not cut inside important regions like the ori or antibiotic resistance marker
I also learned that metabolic engineering is not only about expressing one gene, but about balancing pathways, precursor availability, and cellular stress
Designing the crtY construct in Benchling reminded me a lot of the workflow I used previously for KitBi, so it was nice to feel more confident with synthetic biology tools this time
The virtual digestion and assembly steps helped me understand restriction cloning much better, especially how compatible sticky ends are used to insert DNA fragments into plasmid backbones

Thanks for reading! Also, you can check the same info at my Notion webpage: Week12Notion