Team:Monash Australia/Project

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Overall project Ethylene products we can relate to In simpler terms Experimental plan Results

Overall project


So what is ethylene used for?


How do we currently make ethylene?


How do plants make ethylene?


So what are the more common items we can relate to?

In simplier terms

Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET)

For something we can relate to, we can use the example of Bottled water. The polymer used to create bottle is Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET), and according to the Pacific Institute and bottled water alliance, over 15,000 tonnes of PET was used in packaging bottled water in 2009-10 in Australia, To manufacture the PET, approximately 53 million litres of oil was used in 2009-10 in the production of bottles for water in Australia. This figure exclude mining and transportation of crude materials. These figures are only for bottled water, when you take into account every other bottled product and ethylene based product there is a huge amount of oil required. We can not completely stop the use of plastic, in fact it is probably impossible to imagine life without plastic and we therefore were inspired to find a way to provide the precursor at a much lower impact to the planet. By genetically engineering Escherichia coli to produce ethylene, we remove the need and risks of mining and processing oil, and the extraction/production of ethylene which is a energy intensive and a heavily polluting process (CO2 and NOx production). We also decrease the reliance on mining oil, which can lead to disastrous oil spills, such as the recent Gulf of Mexico incident, which can affect the livelihood of many families, the impact it has on the environment, economic loss, and the destruction of wildlife. (Sources: The Pacific Institute and The bottled Water Alliance)

Experimental plan

Yang cycle

We attempted to use the plant ethylene biosynthesis pathway machinery to genetically engineer Escherichia coli to produce ethylene by the same pathway. The ultimate goal of the project is to remove the need for the high energy steam cracking process and decrease the reliance of fossil fuels to produce ethylene. The main benefit of our design is that once the ethylene is captured, it can be directly feed back into exhisting petrochemical infrastructure, therefore economically speaking there would not be a need for job losses through finding a new source of ethylene.

The Yang Cycle otherwise known as Methionine cycle is a biosynthesis cycle using methionine as a base molecule to produce several different products. We plan to clone three enzymes, SAM synthase, ACC synthase and ACC oxidase from apple and tomato plants and express them together in E. coli.

Metabolic modeling of the desired reaction in an 'E. coli' cell


For future iGEMers these biobricks can potentially be used for future project involving cellular signalling through ethylene production and ethylene receptors, which can be cloned from plants.