Taking inspiration from nature: naturally-inspired design strategies for the production of biorenewable fuels and chemicals

Metabolic engineering has enabled the production of a wide variety of interesting products from biomass-derived sugars. However, challenges remain. Some of these challenges include engineering microbes for enhanced robustness, balancing flux through multiple pathways and identification of molecular parts for uptake, utilization, production and export of under-characterized molecules. This talk will discuss an example of each of challenges. For the engineering of microbes for enhanced robustness, we have turned to a set of environmental Escherichia coli isolates with improved production of fatty acids relative to the lab strains for inspiration. For the balancing of flux through multiple pathways, we have taken inspiration from uropathogenic E. coli’s ability to balance the expression of distinct attachment factors. For the identification of new molecular parts, we have turned to soil isolates for information regarding utilization of the anhydrosugar cellobiosan, which is produced during thermal depolymerization of lignocellulosic biomass.