In 2014, anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions contributed to the highest levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide in at least the last 800,000 years. Ideally, biofuels reduce CO2 emissions based on the ‘closed CO2 cycle’: CO2 that is burned through combustion is reused from the atmosphere to produce the biofuel. Polyketide synthases (PKSs), although they have been explored less thoroughly for such applications, have attractive biosynthetic logic for the production of high value biofuels. While catalytically slower than the fatty acid synthases, the versatility and tailoring of products, along with reprogrammable domains, render polyketide synthases a potentially important resource for biofuel production. In this work, we leverage insights in module PKS assembly to generate a platform to engineer chimeric PKS for the production of various biofuel substitutes. We advance the notion that the exquisite control of PKSs over product formation could generate customized products that have improved combustion properties over existing biofuel substitutes.

Engineering polyketide synthases for production of designer biofuels

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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