S20: Metabolic engineering of bacteria for sustainable production of fatty acid derived products

Finding a sustainable alternative for today’s petrochemical industry is a major challenge facing chemical engineers and society at large. To be sustainable, routes for converting solar energy into organic compounds for use as both fuels and chemical building blocks must be identified, understood, and engineered. Advances in synthetic biology and other biological engineering disciplines have expanded the scope of what can be produced in a living organism. As in other engineering disciplines, synthetic biologists want to apply a general understanding of biology to construct complex systems from well-characterized parts. Once novel synthetic biological systems (e.g. enzymes for biofuel synthesis) are constructed, they must be engineered to function inside living cells without negatively impacting the host’s physiology. In most cases first generation systems fail to meet this goal. My group uses systems biology tools to identify metabolic, regulatory, and/or physiological barriers which often can be overcome with metabolic engineering strategies. Here, I will present work to develop strains of bacteria for producing hydrocarbon compounds from sustainable feedstocks. In this talk, I will describe recent work which identified and characterized enzymes capable of producing alpha-olefins and published work describing engineering efforts to produce fatty acids and fatty acid derived hydrocarbons in Escherichia coli. Our work has combined functional genomics analysis, synthetic biology construction techniques, bioinformatics, and metabolic modeling to metabolically engineer superior microorganisms. We have tested our strains in media formulated with biomass-derived sugars and are developing photosynthetic microorganisms to by-pass the biomass middle man.