Finding a sustainable alternative for today's petrochemical industry is a major challenge facing chemical engineers and society at large. To be sustainable, routes for converting carbon dioxide and light into organic compounds for use as both fuels and chemical building blocks must be identified, understood, and engineered. Advances in metabolic engineering, synthetic biology, and other biological engineering disciplines have expanded the scope of what can be produced in a living organism. As in other engineering disciplines, synthetic biologists want to apply a general understanding of science (e.g. biology and biochemistry) to construct complex systems from well-characterized parts (e.g. DNA and protein). Once novel synthetic biological systems (e.g. enzymes for biofuel synthesis) are constructed, they must be engineered to function inside evolving cells without negatively impacting the host's physiology. In most cases first generation systems fail to meet this goal. My group uses systems biology tools to identify metabolic, regulatory, and/or physiological barriers which often can be overcome with metabolic engineering strategies. In this talk, I will describe pathways for producing high-value commodity chemicals derived from fatty-acids, tools for troubleshooting synthetic biology projects, and how we have combined synthetic biology and systems biology to improve chemical production in bacteria using sustainable feedstocks. Our work has combined functional genomics analysis, synthetic biology construction techniques, bioinformatics, and metabolic modeling to engineer superior microorganisms. We have tested our strains in media formulated with biomass-derived sugars and are developing photosynthetic microorganisms to by-pass the biomass middle man.

Metabolic engineering of bacteria for production of specialty chemicals

245th National Meeting (2013)

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