S115: Genetic techniques and advances in the Archaea: implications for biofuel and natural product production strategies

Archaeal organisms often thrive under intense conditions wherein environmental pressures demand extremely stable enzymes and novel chemistries to sustain life.  There remains much interest in how life can be sustained at extreme temperatures, including understanding the stability of lipids and the maintenance of stable nucleic acid structures.  Further, the biotechnological utility of hyperthermophilic enzymes has long been appreciated and is continual tapped to provide greener chemistries and greater efficiencies to manufacturing processes.  To date, essential all technologies are reliant on expression of single archaeal genes in more genetically tractable bacteria for recombinant expression.  While effective for specific technologies, the bulk of archaeal-encoded chemistries and pathways remain unappreciated and unexplored due to the difficulties in growing and manipulating Archaea.

Harnessing and enhancing archaeal chemistries with modern molecular biology approaches has proven extremely difficult given the dearth of genetic systems for most archaea.  This bottleneck is now removed for the hyperthermophilic archaeon Thermococcus kodakarensis and here we describe a complete and facile genetic system facilitating unlimited and repetitive modification of this hydrogen-producing archaeon.  We describe on-going studies creating the first comprehensive archaeal strain libraries, complementary studies on replicative vectors and selections for new natural products of commercial value, and applications towards increasing biofuel production from diverse sources.