Melabios: A New Friendly Way to Increase Melatonin Production from Plants

The number of people have insomnia keeps increasing for many reasons. Such as colossal workload or addiction to their electronic devices. Taking melatonin, a natural hormone produced in the pineal gland of our brains, will affect one’s sleeping cycle. Our project aims to develop an environmental-friendly and natural way to synthesize melatonin. Melatonin can be found in plants. However, the yield is relatively small. What we try to improve is the yield. We first extract PtoCOMT gene, related to melatonin production, from the poplars' DNA, run gel electrophoresis to test its purity, and then amplify it using polymerase chain reaction. Afterward, we transformed our target gene into two different carriers for storage and expression and transferred them into E.coli. Finally, we changed extracted plasmid into agrobacteria to infect the poplars' leaves, over-expressing our target gene, therefore increasing productivity.we use directed evolution to further perfect tne function of genes.