Engineer yeast with DNA using metabolic selection to create a pink pigment!

Learn crucial biotechnology skills such as pouring agar, streaking yeast, make cells chemically competent, genetically engineer yeast cells, and more.

Learn genetic engineering hands-on using a Yeast Engineer-it Kit. At the end of this life science project, you'll have grown and engineered yeast to produce something for you -- a colorful bio-pigment! A perfect way for beginners and experts alike to do fun and safe biotechnology experiments at home, in the classroom, the makerspace, community center, or in a local biohacking DIYbio lab.

Yeast can be engineered just as bacteria can using the antibiotic selection as you might have seen in the other Yeast Engineer-it Kit with Arctic Green DNA. As a more complex organism, yeast can also be engineered using a process called metabolic selection. In this Yeast Engineer-it Kit for Metabolic Selection, you will grow blank yeast and engineer-it using a DNA plasmid with a gene for creating a pink-colored pigment and a gene called URA3.

URA3 gives yeast the ability to synthesize (create) an enzyme called Orotidine 5'-phosphate decarboxylase (ODCase), so they can in turn create an essential nutrient for survival. In short, your blank yeast are unable to grow unless you either give them the essential nutrient they can not make, or enable them to produce the missing enzyme so they can create the nutrient themselves. This is a very different kind of selection.

With this kit, you will see how engineering different organisms can be done using similar processes using different principles.