Project Info

Merging Biocompatible Catalysis with Metabolic Engineering

Dylan Domaille | ddomaille@mines.edu

One powerful strategy for sourcing industrially relevant chemicals from biomass-derived carbon is metabolic engineering, a process in which an organism is genetically engineered to produce valuable commodity chemicals from sugar. However, several persistent problems plague these approaches. For instance, accumulation of the desired product in the media often harms the microbe, effectively creating a negative feedback loop: as the microbe makes more product, the health of the microbe declines, which severely limits the titer yield of product (i.e., g of product/L of culture). Moreover, there is a relatively narrow range of products that can be made in this approach, especially in comparison to the massive number of products that can be synthesized with synthetic chemistry.

To address this deficiency and improve the overall efficiency of biomass-conversion processes, we are interfacing catalytic upgrading reactions with microbial production of chemical building blocks in single flask processes. Using approaches fundamentally rooted in green chemistry, we identify chemical reactions that can upgrade bacterial metabolites concomitantly with bacterial production, greatly expanding the types of products that can be sourced from biomass.

More Information

http://www.domaillelab.com/project1.html

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5417690/

Grand Engineering Challenge: Develop carbon sequestration methods