The worsening climate crisis requires sustainable chemistry approaches to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across industrial sectors, including chemical manufacturing. A promising method for green chemical production is biological carbon capture using bacteria to convert carbon monoxide into versatile industrial compounds, such as ethanol, at large scales. However, engineering carbon-consuming bacteria to produce new chemicals can take years of effort due to slow growth rates and limited genetic tools for non-model organisms. We implemented cell-free biosynthesis to accelerate this process using crude cell extracts, which enable the exploration of biochemical conversions in the absence of growth and viability constraints with greater throughput and flexibility than living cells. These cell-free systems can produce diverse biochemical products, including styrene and butanol, with rapid design-build-test cycles to prototype biosynthetic enzymes and maximize synthesis of desired products. Our cell-free prototyping approach accelerated the engineering of <i>Clostridium autoethanogenum</i> to develop highly productive strains converting greenhouse gases to acetone and isopropanol in a fraction of the time it would have taken to optimize with cellular methods alone. Continuous culture of acetone production strains at industrial pilot scale produced up to 3 g/L-h while demonstrating significant greenhouse gas savings compared to conventional processes. Together, cellular and cell-free metabolism offer a promising path toward the rapid development of efficient and sustainable chemical synthesis platforms.

Sustainable industrial biomanufacturing accelerated by cell-free biosynthesis

Fall 2022 abstracts, posters, and presentations will launch in mid-September.

ACS Fall 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.