metabolic engineering
BiotechnologyBioprospecting of Native Efflux Pumps To Enhance Furfural Tolerance in Ethanologenic Escherichia coliLignocellulosic biomass, especially agricultural residues, represents an important potential feedstock for microbial production of renewable fuels and chemicals. During the deconstruction of hemicellulose by thermochemical processes, side products that inhibit cell growth and production, such as furan aldehydes, are generated, limiting cost-effective lignocellulose conversion. Here, we developed a new approach to increase cellular...
Biodegradation | SpotlightRapid, Parallel Identification of Catabolism Pathways of Lignin-Derived Aromatic Compounds in Novosphingobium aromaticivoransThe identification of the genes involved in specific biochemical transformations is a key step in predicting microbial function from nucleic acid sequences and in engineering microbes to endow them with new functions. We have shown that new techniques for transposon mutagenesis can dramatically simplify this process and enable the rapid identification of genes in uncharacterized pathways. These techniques provide the necessary scale to...
- BiotechnologyEngineering Escherichia coli for Glutarate Production as the C5 Platform Backbone
Glutarate is an important C5 linear-chain dicarboxylic acid, which is widely used in polyesters and polyamides such as nylon-4,5 and nylon-5,5 in the chemical industry. Glutarate is currently produced from the feedstocks derived from petroleum, specifically by oxidation of a mixture of cyclohexanone and cyclohexanol catalyzed by nitric acid. However, the chemical synthesis results in high pollution and dramatic greenhouse gas...