Engineering Yeast for Synthesis of the Insect Repellent Nepetalactone.

While nepetalactone, the active ingredient in catnip, is a potent insect repellent, its low accumulation limits its commercial viability as an alternative repellent. Here we describe for the first time nepetalactone synthesis in , enabling sustainable and scalable production. Nepetalactone production required introducing eight exogenous genes including the cytochrome P450 geraniol-8-hydroxylase, the bottleneck of the heterologous pathway.

Advancing undergraduate synthetic biology education: insights from a Canadian iGEM student perspective.

The last two decades have seen vigorous activity in synthetic biology research and the ever-increasing applications of these technologies. However, pedagogical research pertaining to teaching synthetic biology is scarce, especially when compared to other science and engineering disciplines. Within Canada, there are only three universities that offer synthetic biology programs, two of which are at the undergraduate level.