Development of a bio-based process to produce platform chemicals from food production waste

Research Project, 2023 – 2026

Many industrially relevant chemicals are produced from fossil fuels in hazardous processes, including some that emit substantial greenhouse gases. Bio-based processes can instead use microorganisms to produce the same desired chemicals without the same hazards, but generally fail to be adopted due to high costs. Agricultural and industrial waste biomass represents an inexpensive growth substrate, but current methods must extensively pretreat the biomass polysaccharides to generate simple sugars for microbial growth. These processes use costly enzyme cocktails or generate growth-inhibitory substances. Here, I propose to reduce or eliminate this pretreatment cost through using bacteria that natively degrade intact polysaccharides from biomass. I will extensively characterize the metabolism of one robust workhorse strain through genetic, biochemical, and computational means, and develop a metabolic database to facilitate additional investigation by the scientific community. Our increased understanding will allow fine-tuning of cell metabolite flow for enhanced chemical synthesis. I will validate this bacterium as a new chassis for chemical production by engineering it to manufacture one important chemical currently made with fossil fuels. The end goal will be to replace this and other environmentally hazardous fossil-based processes with inexpensive, sustainable chemical production from renewable biomass substrates.