VANILLA 2.0: A RELIABLE, SUSTAINABLE, DOMESTIC SUPPLY OF AUTHENTIC VANILLA PLANIFOLIA FLAVOR AND FRAGRANCE

The overall objective of the proposal is to generate a vanilla cell culture for the use in fragrances, foods,drinks, or other products that contain vanilla. While the generation of plant cell cultures is guided bystandard tissue culture practices, the specific tissues, genotypes, hormone concentrations, and optimalmedium are plant species specific. Our Technical Objectives are to further expand the application of plantcell culture to cell suspension culture of vanilla and the production of valuable glycosides, specificallyvanillin. The specific objectives of the program can be enumerated as follows:1. Generate V. planifolia plant cell culture lines that contain a fluorescent reporter that correlates tothe expression of the phenylpropanoid biosynthetic pathway2. Identify environmental variables, elicitors, and chemicals that increase vanillin production.3. Isolate V. planifolia plant cell lines that have increased vanillin production.4. Quantitative determination of vanillin levels from best lines to confirm phenotype.