(425a) Metabolic Engineering of Artemisia Annua Hairy Roots

Malaria claims the lives of over one million people each year partly due to drug resistant parasites and to the expensive treatments. Artemisia annua produces artemisinin which has been shown to have potent anti-malarial properties with few side effects and so far no drug resistant strains. Production of artemisinin from fields of A. annua plants have been unable to keep up with the demand, making the artemisinin based anti-malarial drugs scarce and expensive thus making this system a good target for metabolic engineering.

We believe that the availability of an inducible promoter could facilitate improved metabolic engineering studies by allowing for the investigation of temporal effects, providing an improved negative control against clonal variation, and avoiding the potentially deleterious effects of constitutive expression. Additionally, 1-deoxy-D-xylulose-5-phosphate synthase (DXS) has been identified as a limiting rate reaction in the formation of IPP, a valuable precursor in the production of artemisinin. We will discuss our progress in the engineering of two A. annua hairy root lines: one containing the glucocorticoid inducible promoter with the green fluorescent protein as a maker protein and one containing DXS under the control of the glucocorticoid inducible promoter.