Metabolic engineering for gaseous biofuels production

以低碳足迹增加能源供应的动力很强。丙烷行业可以通过提供一种清洁的高价值燃料，帮助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，从而为这一议程做出贡献。为实现这一目标，燃料开发的可持续解决方案至关重要。生物丙烷（完全从生物源中提取的丙烷，没有任何化学处理）目前是不可用的。我们最近取得了显著的发现，即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。这为从广泛可用的原料中生产生物丙烷开辟了令人兴奋的前景，该应用程序提出了实验室规模的原理验证方法，以证明该方法的实用性。这是一个令人兴奋的机会，可以与工业合作伙伴一起开发用于气体生物燃料生产的合成生物学解决方案。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，并与工业合作伙伴在中试规模上研究它们的性能。这是一个结合合成生物学和生物反应器工程的创新项目，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石油/天然气炼油厂生产丙烷的发展中国家受益，并有可能成为一种强大的从摇篮到摇篮的气体燃料生产解决方案。该项目基于我们最近的开创性工作，我们利用合成生物学的方法，利用基于大肠杆菌的新工程底盘建立了丙烷生物生产路线（Menon et al 2015）。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。这些都是创新的发展，因为在这项工作之前，没有已知的纯生物途径来生产丙烷气。我们寻求利用各种原料建立中试规模生产。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生物技术有限公司的目标原料的规模化/规模化战略提供信息。结果将包括系统的原料评估（如干固体、挥发性固体等）、消化液评估（干、挥发性）和分批和半连续饲喂制度评估。这将涉及使用代谢工程和合成生物学的新菌株操作以及消化和喂养机制的动力学分析。评估研究将探索pH监测，水解温度和发酵碳氢化合物生产，原料补充，气体捕获，进化的沼气组成的定量分析和化学鉴定，以及总体生产动力学和产量。试点研究将由MIB/C3生物技术有限公司合作进行，并将利用Anaero技术公司制造的专利设备。这提供了一个极好的机会，可以在MIB的一个大型研究小组工作，并在致力于开发下一代生物燃料生产技术的工业合作伙伴现场工作。

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.