(66b) Division 15 Early Career Award - Environmental Microbes for Efficient (re)Use of Renewable Feedstocks and Consumer Wastes in Biomanufacturing

Microbial chemical factories are sustainable biomanufacturing platforms that complement traditional petrochemical industries by using renewable and/or waste alternative carbon sources. Environmental microbes that live in harsh environments with high resource competition, such as animal microbiomes, are particularly attractive due to their rich repertoire of enzymes to efficiently process diverse carbon sources and unique capacity to catalyze certain industrial chemistries at scale. However, little is known about these truly non-model microbes with no existing toolsets to engineer them for societal applications. My lab leverages recent advances in systems and synthetic biology to rapidly characterize and exploit these microbial systems for the use of abundant but recalcitrant polymeric wastes. We have developed the first molecular tool kit to engineer lignocellulolytic anaerobic fungi native to the digestive tracts of large herbivores and have exploited these fungi to produce high value esters and aromatic alcohols directly from untreated agricultural residues. We are currently isolating and domesticating powerful new microbes, microbial consortia, and enzymes from mealworm gut microbiomes to degrade and upcycle post-consumer plastic wastes such as polyethylene. In this talk, I will highlight the opportunities and challenges of working with these systems and touch on emerging engineering tools from my group that may be used to fully exploit them.