Chemical biosensors to accelerate the engineering of chemical-producing microbes

Designer microbes able to convert inexpensive sugars into biofuels and value-added chemicals have the potential to provide a sustainable and cost-effective alternative to the synthesis of chemicals from petroleum. Today, the major challenge in the engineering of microbes for the production of non-colorimetric or non-fluorescent chemicals, such as biofuels, is to rapidly identify the highest chemical-producing microbe from a pool, akin to finding a needle in a haystack. Current methods of testing for chemicals synthesized by microbes are low-throughput (10² samples/day) as they rely on chromatography-based technologies. The Peralta-Yahya laboratory is pioneering the use of G-protein coupled receptors as chemical sensors to enable the high-throughput screening (>10⁷ microbes/day) of chemical producing microbes. In this talk, I will discuss how we are engineering Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae for the production of advanced biofuels including D2 diesel and jet fuel biosynthetic alternatives. I will also present recent work on the development of chemical sensors for advanced biofuels, discuss how we are using these sensors for the high-throughput screening of biofuel-producing microbes, and consider how this throughput now allow us to apply evolutionary approaches to the bioproduction of biofuels and other non-colorimetric chemicals.