Rising public awareness to dwindling petroleum resources and global warming has catalyzed research efforts toward the development of renewable methods for fuel and chemical production. The fermentation of food crops such as corn for the production of bioethanol demonstrates that the power of photosynthesis can be effectively harnessed to achieve not only renewable fuel production, but also a means to absorb the carbon dioxide produced by fuel combustion. However, the necessity of providing fermentable sugars for such microbial production has raised concerns of competition for arable land between food and fuel crops. To avoid this issue we are exploring the use of a photosynthetic microorganism, namely cyanobacteria, as a biofuel production platform. As a photosynthetic organism with the ability to directly fix carbon dioxide, the need for fermentable sugars is eliminated. However, while genetic engineering tools are readily available for model organisms such as Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae, this is not the case for cyanobacteria. Our lab has previously engineered production of the chemical feedstock 2,3-butanediol (2,3-BDO) from the model cyanobacterium Synechococcus elongatus sp. PCC 7942. In an effort to further characterize genetic engineering tools from cyanobacteria we are exploring the optimization of 2,3-BDO production by varying ribosomal binding sites, promoter strength, operon organization, and control of gene expression at the transcriptional and translational level. We hope that this work will assist in establishing cyanobacteria as a model organism of choice for chemical production.

Synthetic biology approach to improving cyanobacterial chemical production

249th National Meeting (2015)

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