(15g) Metabolic Engineering of Bacteria for Production of Oleochemicals
AIChE Annual Meeting
2017
2017 Annual Meeting
Food, Pharmaceutical & Bioengineering Division
Biobased Fuels and Chemicals: Biosynthetic Pathway Engineering & Enzymatic Conversion
Sunday, October 29, 2017 - 5:18pm to 5:58pm
In this talk, I will describe pathways for producing high-value commodity chemicals derived from fatty-acids and how my group and others have combined synthetic biology and systems biology to improve oleochemical production in bacteria using sustainable feedstocks. The talk will describe the critical regulatory points in native fatty acid metabolism, strategies for deregulating the pathway, and alternatives that by-pass it altogether. I will highlight the use of heterologous plant and bacterial enzymes to alter the chain length distribution of products from common long-chain molecules to higher-value medium-chain analogs. I will also describe our collaborative efforts with the Maranas lab at Penn State to use computational tools to redesign the substrate specificity of enzymes used to produce medium chain oleochemicals. Here, we have used the IPRO software to identify a small (~60) library of thioesterase mutants that resulted in a new variant that produces 2-fold more fatty acid with over 50% C8 chain lengths, molecules not produced by the native enzyme.