Metabolic engineering for gaseous biofuels production

以低碳足迹增加能源供应的动力很强。丙烷工业可以为这一议程做出贡献，提供一种清洁的高价值“下降”燃料，帮助各国政府制定综合道路燃料和能源政策，并为未来能源供应的多方面挑战提供解决方案。为了实现这一目标，燃料发展的可持续解决方案非常重要。目前还没有生物丙烷(丙烷完全来自生物来源，没有任何化学处理)。我们最近取得了令人瞩目的发现，利用合成生物学的新方法，可以在大肠杆菌的工程菌株中合成生物丙烷。这打开了从广泛可用的原料中生产生物丙烷的令人兴奋的前景，这一应用提出了一种实验室规模的原理证明方法来展示这种方法的实用性。这是一个与工业合作伙伴合作开发合成生物燃料生产的合成生物学解决方案的令人兴奋的机会。该项目将使用现代代谢工程和合成生物学方法来产生用于气体生物燃料生产的新微生物菌株，并与工业合作伙伴一起在中试规模上调查它们的性能。这是一个创新的项目，将合成生物学和生物反应器工程结合起来，以满足当前燃料/能源需求的许多挑战。本地化生产将使依赖于从石油/天然气精炼厂提取的丙烷的发展中国家受益，并有可能作为气态燃料生产的强大从摇篮到摇篮的解决方案产生影响。该项目是基于我们最近的开创性工作，在这些工作中，我们利用合成生物学的方法，利用新设计的基于大肠杆菌的底盘建立了丙烷生物生产路线(Menon等人，2015)。其结果是创造了一系列改良的大肠杆菌菌株，当在实验室原料上生长时，这些菌株会积累丙烷气体。考虑到在这项工作之前没有已知的生产丙烷气体的纯生物途径，这些都是创新的发展。我们寻求建立使用各种原料的试生产规模。使用获得专利的厌氧消化器，我们将生成强大的实验室规模数据(曼彻斯特生物技术研究所)，这些数据将为C3生物技术有限公司现场的目标原料提供扩大/扩大战略方面的信息。结果将包括系统的原料评估(例如，干固体、挥发性固体等)、消化液(干、挥发性)的评估以及对间歇和半连续喂养制度的评估。这将涉及利用代谢工程和合成生物学进行新的菌种操作，并分析消化和饲喂制度的动力学。评估研究将探索pH监测、发酵产生的水解物和碳氢化合物的温度、原料补充、气体捕获、演化沼气成分的定量分析和化学鉴定，以及总体生产动力学和产量。这项试点研究将是MIB/C3生物技术有限公司之间的合作伙伴关系，还将利用阿纳罗技术公司制造的专利钻机。这为在MIB的大型研究小组和致力于为生物燃料生产开发下一代技术的工业合作伙伴现场工作提供了绝佳的机会。

There is a strong drive to increase energy supply with a low carbon footprint. The propane industry can contribute to this agenda by providing a clean high value 'drop in' fuel that can help governments develop integrated road fuels and energy policies and provide solutions to the multi-faceted challenges of future energy supply. In achieving this aim, sustainable solutions to fuels development are important. Bio-propane (propane derived entirely from biological source in absence of any chemical treatment) is currently not available. We have made the recent and remarkable discovery that bio-propane can be synthesised in engineered strains of the bacterium Escherichia coli using the new methods of synthetic biology. This now opens up the exciting prospect of producing bio-propane from widely available feedstocks and this application sets out a lab-scale proof-of-principle approach to demonstrate the utility of this approach.This is an exciting opportunity to work to develop synthetic biology solutions for gaseous biofuels production with an industrial partner. The project will use modern metabolic engineering and synthetic biology methods to generate new microbial strains for gaseous biofuels production and investigate their performance at pilot scale with the industrial partner. This is an innovative project uniting synthetic biology and bioreactor engineering to meet the many challenges of current fuels/energy demands. Localised production of would benefit developing nations that have been dependent on propane derived from oil/gas refineries, and has the potential to impact as a powerful cradle-to-cradle solution to gaseous fuels production. The project is based on our recent pioneering work in which we have established propane bio-production routes with newly engineered chassis based on Escherichia coli using the methods of synthetic biology (Menon et al 2015). The result was to create a series of modified E. coli strains that accumulate propane gas when grown on laboratory feedstocks. These are innovative developments given that prior to this work there were no known pure biological routes to propane gas production. We seek to establish pilot scale production using a variety of feedstocks. Using the patented anaerobic digestors we will generate robust lab-scale data (Manchester institute of Biotechnology) that will inform on scale-out/scale-up strategies with target feedstocks at the site of C3 Biotechnologies Ltd. The outcomes will include systematic feedstock evaluations (e.g. dry solids, volatile solids etc), assessment of digestates (dry, volatile) and assessment of batch and semi continuous feeding regimes. This will involve new strain manipulations using metabolic engineering and synthetic biology and analysis of the kinetics of digestion and feeding regimes The evaluation studies will explore pH monitoring, temperature of hydrolysis and hydrocarbon production by fermentation, feedstock supplementation, gas capture, quantitative analysis and chemical identify of evolved biogas compositions, and overall production kinetics and yield. The pilot study will be a partnership between MIB/C3 Biotechnologies Ltd and will also exploit a patented rig made by Anaero Technology. This provides a superb opportunity to work in a large research group in MIB and on site at industrial partners committed to developing next-generation technology for biofuels production.