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Pseudomonas Aeruginosa Essay

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Directed Evolution of Pseudomonas aeruginosa Lipase A Petroleum has long been a precious resource throughout history. Petroleum was likely used to construct asphalt that made the great towers and walls of Babylon (Leung, 1989). China used it to extract precious salt from seawater (Lerner, Wu, & Lin, 1964). Today, the world faces the challenge of creating enough fuel to satisfy the demands of a petroleum-dependent world. With the pressures of supply and demand ever increasing, industries around the globe have sought alternative measures to create this precious substance. One of the most promising methods in obtaining hydrocarbon-based fuels has been found in synthetic biology with the use of microorganisms, as they readily grow, divide, …show more content…

This technique takes prior knowledge of the enzyme’s primary amino acid sequence. An array of specific primers have variations in their sequence, such that a precise region of amino acids can be changed to all 20 amino acids present on the codon chart. The famous experiment using this technique took place in 2005 when researchers modified residues of a hormone receptor to bind a variety of ligands (Zaks & Klibanov, 1984). Researchers subsequently realized the importance of changing specific amino acids and extended this technique to site directed mutagenesis, a technique which involves only point mutations to the DNA sequence to yield changed amino acid residues at specific locations. Background information of PAL Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a gram-negative bacterium that can pose as a pathogen for plants and animals. This pathogen has been characterized and proven to produce a secreted lipase that could be used for a number of industrial applications. Lipases are chosen for industrial purposes largely due to their production of chemicals that can be used in pharmaceuticals, biofuels, or other products (Nakagawa, Hasegawa, Hiratake, & Sakata, 2007). Additionally, these enzymes display a lack of generality in terms of substrate binding. In other words, lipases can bind a variety of substrates, making them valuable for many applications. They also have been reported to function in both aqueous and

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