Microbial production of monomers, such as styrene and fatty acids, by microbial cell factories is often limited by product toxicity. Microbial utilization of cheap biomass-derived sugars is similarly plagued by the presence of inhibitors. This microbial inhibition can in turn impact the process economics by increasing product separation costs or by requiring additional processing of the feedstock. One approach to mitigating this problem is increasing the robustness of the microbial cell factory, through both rational engineering efforts and evolution and reverse engineering of evolved strains. This talk will discuss our work to increase production of styrene and fatty acids, and utilization of thermochemically depolymerized biomass, with a focus on engineering of the microbial cell membrane at the level of the fatty acids tails, the phospholipid head groups, and the membrane-associated proteins and sugars.

Engineering of robust microbial cell factories for monomer production

254th National Meeting (2017)

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