Reprogramming Halomonas for Enhanced Production of Chemicals

Due to the disadvantages of bioprocesses including energy consuming sterilization, high fresh water consumption, discontinuous fermentation to avoid microbial contamination, highly expensive stainless steel fermentation facilities and competing substrates for human consumption, industrial biotechnology is less competitive compared with chemical processes. Recently, halophiles have shown promises to overcome these shortcomings. Due to their unique halophilic properties, some halophiles are able to grow in high pH and high NaCl containing medium, practically, seawater, under higher temperature, allowing fermentation processes to run contamination free under unsterile conditions and continuous way in seawater. We have developed genetic manipulation methods for halophiles. In this lecture, halophiles were reprogrammed to produce bioplastics polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA), ectoines, enzymes, and bio-surfactants with improved efficiency including morphology engineering to change the shapes of Halomonas spp to allow convenient downstream processing. This lecture will focus on bioplastics polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) as an example to illustrate how Halomonas can be reprogrammed for various applications.