TWB supports iGEM Toulouse 2020

TWB supports the French project of the iGEM Toulouse 2020 team, composed of eight students from INSA Toulouse and University Paul Sabatier (University of Toulouse). The aim of the project, called iGEMINI, is is to facilitate long-duration space travels by providing high quality food intake.

About iGEMINI

The members of the project aim to answer the following question: how can we produce fresh food supplements for astronauts in space? This question derives from the fact that the nutritional capacity of food is unstable. Currently, food consumed in space is prepared on Earth, where it is sterilized or dehydrated, and then transported into space. These processes, however, destroy a fair amount of nutrients, resulting in a 10 to 50% vitamin loss. Furthermore, these nutrients deteriorate over time. This is a major problem for long-duration space travels.
To face this issue, we wish to design a near-autonomous system of yeast production based on an acetogen/yeast coculture. The yeast will be engineered beforehand to produce vitamins and other molecules of interest for the astronauts’ well-being.

The members of the project are supervised by researchers and teacher-researchers (and overseed by Brice Enjalbert, INSA Toulouse and Yves Roméo, Université Toulouse III-Paul Sabatier).

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About iGEM

The prestigious iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine) competition in synthetic biology is organized by the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Every October since 2004, in Boston (United States), it has brought together more than 300 teams of biology students from all over the world who have worked on the development of an innovative biological system to address a current problem.

The iGEM 2020 projects will be presented virtually from 14 to 16 November 2020.