(489p) Engineering Metabolism in E. Coli for High Level Production of Fatty Acids From Glucose

Fatty acids are aliphatic monocarboxylic acids existed in esterified lipid form of fat, oil, or wax in plant, animal or microorganisms in natural. Natural fatty acids commonly have a chain of four to 28 carbons, they are usually unbranched, numbered and may be saturated or unsaturated.Fatty acids are essential to all organisms ? as substrates for energy production, as precursors of membrane lipids and as signalling molecules that control various cellular processes, including gene expression. Fatty acids and their derivatives were widely involved in every area of industrial activity. Many of them are used in every day life as products, or constituents of products. Many fatty acids such as fabric softeners or the polyolesters used in synlubes are merchandised in large volumes. The field of fatty acids is highly diversified and complex -- mainly the chemical complexity of products as well as the great deal of market diversity. Fatty acids are also critical important in terms of biodiesel, the methyl or ethyl esters of fatty acids which regarded as the most important bio-renewable source of energy in the world, is currently highly limited by the production of oil crops. For this reason, developing microbial systems for effective production of high quality fatty acids is highly desirable in industry. E. coli is one of the most thoroughly studied microorganism. It is a favorite organism for genetic engineering as cultures of it can be made to produce unlimited quantities of the product of introduced genes or pathway. Here we present our progress in developing the necessary techniques and tools to design and construct efficient Escherichia coli host strains and expression systems for high level production of fatty acids from glucose -- We synthetically synthesize thioesterase (TE) genes from various sources targeting at the formation of free fatty acid with different chain lengths, express these thioesterase (TE) gene in our mutant E.coli strains aimed to direct carbon fluxes from glucose to the desired product.