S68: Hydrocarbon-based fuels from yeast: The industrialization of synthetic biology

Living systems have an enormous capacity to synthesize diverse chemical structures.  Demonstrating the ability to make new and useful compounds via microbial fermentations has become a common and relatively facile endeavor.  Reaching maximum yield and productivity has become the major challenge for industrial microbiology because such efficiency is required to reach the cost targets of fuels and chemicals.  Engineering a highly productive strain can be accomplished by multiple rounds of strain design, testing, analysis and re-design – a process that is dramatically enhanced by the ability to construct thousands of strains in a short time frame.  To rationally construct thousands of strains per week, we have employed a novel platform to make DNA construction standard and modular.   We then coupled the modular molecular biology underpinning DNA construction with robotics to automate the unit operations of strain engineering.  The system has enabled a 100-fold increase in our ability to create new, rationally designed yeast for the production of hydrocarbon-based fuels.  With this capability we are able to investigate tens of thousands of strain constructions, using combinatorial solutions to enhance the productivity of strains making our fuels and chemicals.  The platform of automated strain engineering represents a significant step in the industrialization of strain construction.