Engineering Biological Production of Butanol Through Ligning-Derived Growth of Methylobacterium extorquens PA1
Additional Funding Sources
The project described was supported by the Research Experience for Undergraduates Program Site: Molecular and organismal evolution at the University of Idaho under Award No. 1757826.
Abstract
Our goal is to engineer Methylobacterium extorquens PA1 with the capability to grow on plant-derived aromatics, i.e. ferulic acid, for the conversion of carbon towards butanol, a renewable biofuel. Previously, we characterized our engineered PA1 strains housing both pca and van pathways on precursors of ferulic acid, vanillic acid and protocatechuic acid, which possessed slow growth rates, extended lag periods, and poor growth yields. Currently, we are experimenting with several differing lab adapted evolution schemes to explore beneficial alterations of these foreign pathways in PA1. We expect to see both common mutations for growth on aromatics between all populations, and those which may be unique to each separate evolution scheme. Future work is geared at characterizing evolved isolates and using a transposon saturated library to further categories endogenous genes required for utilization of these foreign aromatic pathways.
Engineering Biological Production of Butanol Through Ligning-Derived Growth of Methylobacterium extorquens PA1
Our goal is to engineer Methylobacterium extorquens PA1 with the capability to grow on plant-derived aromatics, i.e. ferulic acid, for the conversion of carbon towards butanol, a renewable biofuel. Previously, we characterized our engineered PA1 strains housing both pca and van pathways on precursors of ferulic acid, vanillic acid and protocatechuic acid, which possessed slow growth rates, extended lag periods, and poor growth yields. Currently, we are experimenting with several differing lab adapted evolution schemes to explore beneficial alterations of these foreign pathways in PA1. We expect to see both common mutations for growth on aromatics between all populations, and those which may be unique to each separate evolution scheme. Future work is geared at characterizing evolved isolates and using a transposon saturated library to further categories endogenous genes required for utilization of these foreign aromatic pathways.
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