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You are a research scientist for a company that is trying to survive by selling artificial material to replace damaged cartilage tissue. You have a good product, but it's hideously expensive. Why? The material is produced in a similar way as natural cartilage, using a scaffold of proteoglycans (proteins with sugars attached), the major component of which is chondroitin sulfate. The process needs a lot of this costly protein.
Chondroitin sulfate is synthesized from glucuronic acid, through a reaction catalyzed by the enzyme UDP-Glucose Dehydrogenase. If you only had a cheap source of UDP-Glucose Dehydrogenase... You decide to overexpress the gene encoding the enzyme in E. coli. |