Isoprenoids are naturally occurring hydrocarbons with a branched, and in many cases, a cyclic structure. They are produced mostly by plant and have been used traditionally as medicine and fragrance ingredients. However, recently the use of these molecules as biofuels has been explored and has shown a great possibility especially with their great cold weather property to be used as Diesel or Jet fuel alternatives.To use isoprenoids as biofuels, the production in plants, the natural producer, may not be adequate due to the limitation of scalability and the land use issue. So the engineering of microorganisms that can produce a large amount of isoprenoids became an attractive option to the researchers in biofuel field recently.In this report, we first designed and identified isoprenoid compounds, specifically monoterpenes (C10) and sesquiterpenes (C15) that can be potentially used as a fuel. We have tested the appropriate fuel properties of the target compounds, and engineered the heterologous biosynthetic pathway into two model hosts, E. coli and S. cerevisiae, to produce these terpene compounds with a relatively high yield.To achieve higher production titer of these potential terpene fuel molecules, we have optimized the pathway to accumulate the precursors using synthetic biology tools, and also engineered the host strain to make fermentation process more efficient.

Microbial production of terpene-based advanced biofuels

243rd National Meeting (2012)

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