Biochemicals from forestry biomass

数千年来，微生物一直被用来生产令人满意的化学物质，从赋予奶酪味道的分子到啤酒或葡萄酒中的乙醇。这些化学物质可以是复杂的，也可以是简单的，但本质上都是由微生物代谢产生的单糖。今天，我们有能力将这种代谢操作发展到一个新的水平，通过在微生物中创造新的代谢途径来制造我们发现有用但微生物不能自然产生的化学物质。这使我们有可能用绿色、可持续的化学品取代石油衍生化学品，并将林业纸浆工业的产品从越来越低价值的新闻纸生产转向生产这些有价值的化学品。林业生物质生物化学项目将设计酵母的能力，将木材纤维加工产生的糖转化为己二酸，这是一种具有商业价值的聚合物尼龙的化学组成部分。

Microorganisms have been used for thousands of years to produce desirable chemicals, ranging from the molecules that give taste to cheeses to the ethanol in beer or wine. These chemicals can be complex or simple, but all are essentially derived from simple sugars by the metabolism of microbes. Today we have the capacity to develop this type of metabolic manipulation to a new level, by creating new metabolic pathways in microbes to make chemicals we find useful but that the microbes do not naturally produce. This allows us the potential of both replacing petroleum-derived chemicals with green, sustainable chemicals, and directing the products of the forestry pulp industry away from the increasingly low value production of newsprint to the production of such valuable chemicals. The Biochemicals from Forestry Biomass project will engineer the capacity of yeasts to turn sugars derived from the processing of wood fibre into adipic acid, a chemical building block of the commercially valuable polymer nylon.