Talk:CH391L/S12/Artemisinic Acid Engineering

• Jeffrey E. Barrick 12:41, 15 April 2012 (EDT):History of the compound is very interesting and well done. It might be good to give a short background or link to how malaria works. What kind of organism is Plasmodium? How does an infection progress?
  • Peter Otoupal 11:48, 16 April 2012 (EDT) Thanks! I added a brief answer to this in the beginning. Luckily, malaria is a relatively well characterized disease that seems to be receding; the new paper I referenced mentions that malaria cases in Africa have been reduced by 30% in less than 10 years.

• Jeffrey E. Barrick 12:41, 15 April 2012 (EDT):Great description of their work. There is an earlier paper published about a checkpoint in their engineering efforts where they appear to have been moving the yeast enzymes to E. coli to get it to produce artemisinin. Is this evidence that they were evaluating multiple chassis and had to switch to yeast later?[1].

• Jeffrey E. Barrick 12:18, 15 April 2012 (EDT):Looks like you have the new reports of resistance to Artemisinin covered. Do they know what the mutations are and why they make it resistant?
  • Peter Otoupal 12:07, 16 April 2012 (EDT)I will look into this when I get to campus and can open the full texts.

• Jeffrey E. Barrick 12:41, 15 April 2012 (EDT):It's usually good to avoid value judgements, like calling something "famous", in scientific or formal writing.
  • Peter Otoupal 11:48, 16 April 2012 (EDT) Removed all the qualitative judgement calls.

References

1. Martin VJ, Pitera DJ, Withers ST, Newman JD, and Keasling JD. Engineering a mevalonate pathway in Escherichia coli for production of terpenoids. Nat Biotechnol. 2003 Jul;21(7):796-802. DOI:10.1038/nbt833 |