alternative way to produce vanillin

2. Introduction
Vanilla? Vanillin?
Greenish-yellow flowers are pollinated by bees, whose ovaries
swell into fruits referred to as “pods” (often mistakenly called
“beans”) after about 4 weeks. Thousands of tiny, black seeds
line the inside of the pods. The fruit acquires its famous vanilla
flavor when it is dried and cured by fermentation.
Vanillin is natural crystal-like component formed on the cured
and processed vanilla pods. It is the substance you taste in
vanilla, but it’s not the only ingredient of vanilla. This compound
is the major component of vanilla.

3. Why produce vanillin by
biotechnological method?
• Most important aromatic flavor compounds
used in foods, beverages, perfumes and
pharmaceuticals
• Worldwide demand for natural vanilla
beans cannot be met by available supply
• Produced at a relatively low cost but high
market cost

4. Plant tissue culture (PTC)
• Process of producing plants from tissues of
the desired plant in an artificial nutrient
medium under controlled environment.
• The plants so produced would be exactly
similar to the mother plant in all aspects.
• Rationale : based upon cultured plant cell
unique biochemical, genetic capacity and
totipotency of plant cells.

5. Why use PTC ?
• Tissue culture raised plants are vigorous and fast
growing than conventional plants.
• High degree of uniformity than the conventionally
produced plants.
• The tissue culture plantlets are free from
diseases/pathogens.
• It is possible to multiply plants that are difficult to
propagate by cuttings or other traditional methods.
• Tissue culture plants yield better as they are produced
under optimum environment from selected mother
plants.

6. Steps involved in PTC
1) Explant: Cut-out Plant Tissue and Place in
Tissue Culture Container

7. 2) Multiplication: Tissue Grows and Produces
Small Plants

8. 3) Rapid Multiplication by Transfer of Cultures

9. 4) Transplanting

10. Advantages of PTC
•
•
•
•
Mass production of plant cultivar
Production of pathogen-free plants
Germplasm preservation
Year round nursery production

11. Disadvantages of PTC
• Contamination risks
• Individual response to tissue culture
conditions varies

12. GMO yeast-vanillin
• Also known as Synbio (synthetic biology)
vanillin
• Comes from genetically modified fermented
yeast and synthetic DNA
• The yeast by product including the flavour
compound as they fed with sugar

13. General processing step
Yeast is
modified with
synthetic
DNA
The
fermentation
by-product is
collected
The modified
yeast is fed
with sugar
Leave the
modified yeast
to ferment the
sugar

14. Advantages of GMO yeast-vanillin
• The process is sustainable and environmental
friendly
• The price of vanillin can be reduced
• The product was more natural compared to
chemical substitute

15. Disadvantages of GMO yeast-vanillin
• The loss of economy source for farmers that use
vanilla cultivation as main source of their income
• No regulatory structure or even protocols for
assessing the safety of synthetic organisms in the
environment
• No law stated for labeling and customers
rejecting the product with it
• The taste was not really much like the original
vanilla

16. Economic considerations
• Traditional method
- high cost and need lots of flowers to
produce just 1 kg of vanillin
- the cultivation area also did not increase
within time while the demand is increasing,
making the vanilla price go higher
• Plant tissue culture-based vanilla
- slightly lower cost compared to traditional
method

17. Economic considerations (cont…)
- an improvement needed in this field to
bring down the cost of vanilla flavour and
make the process a viable alternative
• GMO yeast-vanillin
- lower prices compared to other method
since the yield is much higher
- but there are customer rejection towards
the product

18. Safety considerations
• The production of flavouring through chemical
means is environmentally unsafe while the
natural food additive in high demand.
• Thus is it attracted the attention of
biotechnologist to produce comparable
organoleptic flavouring.
• However, the risk of using genetically
engineered organism for producing flavour
needs a detailed assesment.

19. Safety considerations (cont…)
• From a consumers point of view, labelling the
products as biotechnologically derived may be
recommended.