(409e) Systems for Single Step Consolidated Bioprocessing of Unprocessed Agri Materials Using Thermophiles

The United States offers substantial competitive advantages in the drive to replace petroleum-based products and the associated chemical synthesis routes. These advantages include: a very strong agricultural sector with the largest amount of arable land in the world, the largest chemicals and plastics market in the world; an existing industry for bio-based products, and global leadership in bioscience and industrial biotechnology. However, even after decades of investment, releasing sugars from lignocellulosic biomass remains a critical bottleneck, retarding the commercial success of the industries based on the sugar platforms. Against this challenge, non-model microorganisms often hold complex phenotypes that could be valuable for the future of biological processes that underpin innovations for bioplastics, bioenergy, and bioproduct research. This work presents the unique physiology and metabolic capabilities of one such non-model microbe belonging to genus Geobacillus sp. to depolymerize unprocessed agri-wastes as the carbon source and produce some key industrial biochemicals. This thermophilic Geobacillus sp. has been adapted to depolymerize, an average 63 wt.% of the unprocessed (not subjected to physical, chemical, and enzymatic pretreatment) agri-wastes. A comparative analysis of the transcriptomes of this Geobacillus sp. on different carbon sources, including glucose, unprocessed corn stover, cellulose, xylan, and lignin, identified key candidate genes regulating the expression of ligninolytic enzyme genes. Specifically, Geobacillus sp. can degrade xylan, amorphous cellulose, starch/pullulan, and assimilate disaccharides such as cellobiose, maltose, melibiose, raffinose, stachyose, sucrose, and mannitol. The monomeric sugars that Geobacillus sp. can potentially metabolize are (C6) glucose, galactose, fructose, and (C5) xylose, arabinose, and mannose. For the bioprocessing industries, this study presents new insight into the metabolic routes of carbon capture and transfer in a consolidated bioprocessing Geobacillus host, where a single microbe is essentially armored to de-bond cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin.