Metabolic engineering for gaseous biofuels production

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

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.