SBIR-STTR Award

Vanilla is a widely used ingredient found in thousands of products. Most commercial vanilla production has been off shored. The U.S. manufacturers that utilize natural vanilla must import this crop but this material often has issues with high prices inconsistent supply chains variation in quality and imparts a heavy toll on local people and ecosystems where it is produced. We aim to solve the current issues with vanilla by the development of a commercial Vanilla planifolia plant cell culture. The liquid culture of plants is an established technology in which plants are grown as a fine suspension of small clumps or single cells. Unlike V. planifolia plants an V. planifolia cell culture can be domestically-produced in a safe and high quality way without pesticides or adulterants. Chi Botanic has recently established a V. planifolia cell culture. Our objective for this Phase I proposal is to increase the vanillin content of our vanilla plant cell cultures so they can be used in fragrances foods drinks and cosmetics. To increase the vanillin content of our V. planifolia plant cell cultures we aim to (1) identify environmental variables elicitors and chemicals that turn on vanillin biosynthesis (2) use fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) to isolate plant cell lines that have increased vanillin content (3) quantitate levels of vanillin in isolated lines and (4) generate a fluorescent reporter that correlates to the expression of the vanillin biosynthetic pathway. Our high-throughput approaches will explore more V. planifolia genotype-phenotype and environment-phenotype space than ever before. This research will establish V. planifolia cell culture technology as an innovative and domestic way to produce vanilla.