https://video.igem.org/videos/watch/ef398e5b-7074-499d-a45b-c93291e3263f Title: Croteen: When a Hundred and Fifty Thousand Flowers are replaced with bacteria Description: Saffron — the world's most expensive spice — yields crocetin, a powerful natural antioxidant and bioactive compound with tremendous therapeutic potential. But extracting it from saffron is costly, labor-intensive, and limited by harvest yields—each gram of saffron demands the hand-picking of approximately 150,000 Crocus sativus flowers. Our project, Croteen, asks what if a few bottles of bacteria could do the work of 150,000 flowers. By engineering E. coli with an eight-enzyme pathway, we turn the microbe into a crocetin micro-factory, producing this invaluable compound through scalable fermentation instead of labor-intensive cultivation. With large-scale production confirmed, we launched crocetin essential oil and crocetin capsules, both built around its potential to relieve anxiety. And when our process drives costs down a hundredfold or even a thousandfold, what was once “Red Gold” will become accessible to all. Official Page Sat, 29 Aug 2026 17:16:51 GMT https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html PeerTube - https://video.igem.org https://video.igem.org/client/assets/images/icons/icon-1500x1500.png https://video.igem.org/videos/watch/ef398e5b-7074-499d-a45b-c93291e3263f All rights reserved, unless otherwise specified in the terms specified at https://video.igem.org/about and potential licenses granted by each content's rightholder.