Parts

Our project is dedicated to developing a new generation of dietary sweeteners, aiming to achieve the dual goals of "promoting gut health" and "reducing calorie intake". This innovative sugar substitute can be widely applied in various food products, helping to lower the overall sugar consumption of the population, thereby improving metabolic health and alleviating obesity and its related complications. Among them, agar oligosaccharides (AOS) and fructo-oligosaccharides (FOS) have become functional sweetening ingredients with great application potential due to their excellent prebiotic properties, and are widely used in healthy food and nutritional supplements.

The core of our technical approach lies in the engineering application of specific biological components, which specifically include:

• AgaE (BBa_2552W5YK)：AgaE catalyzes the hydrolysis of α-1,3 glycosidic linkages within agarose, resulting in the formation of AOS. The AgaE-encoding gene, originating from Thalassomonas sp. LD5, was codon-optimized and synthesized to improve recombinant expression yields in E. coli.;

• Inulinase (BBa_25KTPH1H)：Inulinase specifically cleaves the β-2,1 glycosidic bonds between fructose units in inulin, generating FOS. The gene sequence of Inulinase is derived from Aspergillus arachidicola and has been codon-optimized for the E. coli host to enhance expression efficiency in a heterologous expression system.