Growing energy consumption has stimulated efforts towards discovery of alternative pathways for the synthesis of fuels. Currently, isobutanol is regarded as a better candidate as a substitute for gasoline due to its higher energy density and lower hygroscopicity. Recently, E. coli was genetically engineered to produce isobutanol. In this work, we used the Biochemical Network Integrated Computational Explorer (BNICE) framework to predict and evaluate the known pathway and novel pathways from pyruvate to isobutanol. The known pathway via 2-ketoisovalerate was reproduced while two novel pathways were proposed . Different pathway screening criteria including pathway length, thermodynamic feasibility , metabolic flux analysis and protein structure availability were used to evaluate and compare the novel pathway candidates against the known pathway. A study based on protein structure and ligand binding was also conducted for a selection of key enzymes in both the known and novel pathways.

Discovery and evaluation of novel pathways for synthesis of isobutanol

243rd National Meeting (2012)

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