Novel Biosynthetic Pathways for Production of Acids and Alcohols

Microbes are being increasingly used as “microbial chemical factories” to produce compounds that include bulk and specialty chemicals, materials, pharmaceuticals, and biofuels.  As new products are desired through biological conversion, new enzyme catalysts are needed to mediate these transformations.  We have exploited the promiscuous activity of several different enzymes in order to build a versatile platform pathway for the synthesis of various 3-hydroxyalkanoic acids, fatty acids and alcohols.  Examining the product profile in vivo has led to greater understanding of the constituent enzymes in the absence of access to the substrates needed for in vitro analysis.  I will discuss our findings to date with this pathway, as well as challenges that we face towards linking in vitro characterization to in vivo performance, and opportunities to use experimental data to guide the selection of additional enzyme variants that may have higher target activities.