9-06: Challenges and progress in the rapid commercial development of sustainable chemicals

There is an urgent need for sustainable replacements of chemicals that are currently derived from fossil fuels. LS9 has engineered efficient biosynthetic routes and processes to produce a variety of sustainable chemicals and fuels, including esters, alcohols, alkenes, and alkanes. The strengths of our approach include feedstock flexibility, harnessing the efficiency of fatty acid biosynthesis, and employing an engineering strategy that places all chemical unit operations within a single whole cell catalyst.

Industrial production of sustainable chemicals demands rapid progress in developing microbial strains and bioprocesses that achieve commercially viable yields and productivities. I will highlight some of the challenges, different approaches, and examples of recent progress in the production of fatty acid-derived chemicals.