(188c) Biosensor Based Engineering of Synthetic Pathways for Biomanufacturing

Depletion of fossil reserves, energy security, climate changes and environmental pollution have turned the attention of researchers to develop alternate renewable resource-based technologies in order to move to a sustainable bio-based economy. Advancements in synthetic biology tools have enabled the tailoring of high throughput synthetic designs into microbial host for the production of virtually any molecule - fuels, bioplastics, commodity chemicals and pharmaceuticals. However, they are often challenged by the intricate interplay of metabolic networks in the host background causing metabolic burden to its production chassis limiting their growth and product titers. Biosensors targeting metabolites when coupled to fluorescence monitoring is a simple, quick and superior evaluation method of these subtle designs (throughput > 10⁶ variants/day) over traditionally used methods of chromatography and spectrometry (throughput < 10³variants/day). In the current poster, I will present the efforts in our lab to develop genetic biosensors and their utilization to evolve biosynthetic pathways for improved culture performance and titers of molecules that are industrially relevant and currently sourced from petroleum