Synthetic biology for industrial gas fermentation – novel metabolic engineering for a carbon smart future

Founded in 2005, LanzaTech is commercializing a pioneering carbon capture and reuse technology that recycles carbon-rich waste gases (containing carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and/or hydrogen) into daily products such as fuel ethanol, jet fuel, or chemicals used for production of nylon. By capturing and reusing waste gases, LanzaTech’s microbes displace a need to use fossil reserves for fuel and chemical production. Today we have three commercial facilities under construction, in Taiwan with China Steel; in China with Capital Steel and in Belgium with the world’s largest steel producer, ArcelorMittal.

While the native strain C. autoethanogenum, produces ethanol and 2,3-butanediol from CO/CO₂ through the well-characterized Wood-Ljungdahl pathway, LanzaTech has developed and established genetic toolkits that include genome modification tools and libraries of genetic parts to harness the central metabolic flux for expression of heterologous pathways. Moreover, exhaustive Systems Biology analyses on the microbe and a predictive genome scale metabolic model have been carried out and constructed to guide strain engineering and optimization processes.  The vast information obtained for the acetogen has facilitated further improvement of the ethanol process and identification of optimal routes to novel biochemical products. At the present, LanzaTech has diversified its product portfolio from ethanol and 2,3-butanediol to more than 20 other products that include butanol, acetone, isopropanol, and 1,3-butanediol, a preferred four-carbon alcohol for catalytic conversion to bio-butadiene.

LanzaTech’s Systems Biology platform for C. autoethanogenum will be discussed   highlighting significant discoveries   essential for product synthesis which enable LanzaTech to develop effective metabolic engineering strategies for the organism.