Team:HUBU-WUHAN/Description
Waste Cartons
To Renewable Bioproducts
Inspiration
Project
Abstract
Our project aims to build up biological parts in Zymomonas mobilis for converting waste cartons into Poly-β-hydroxybutyrate (PHB) and biofuels (e.g. ethanol, isobutanol). Z. mobilis is a non-model Gram-negative ethanologenic bacterium with many desirable industrial characteristics, and it is amenable for genetic manipulation[1]. So far, many biological parts have been characterized from and for model species, while only limited studies were carried out on their compatibility and significant amount of omics data have not widely utilized yet. We explore the possibility to express the cellulosome in the Z. mobilis to construct consolidated bioprocessing (CBP) strains that can directly convert cellulose into fermentable sugars, which can then be used as carbon sources for biofuel and bio-plastics production. In addition, a dual reporter-gene system established for Z. mobilis is used to effectively characterize biological parts[2]. Moreover, through a newly developed native CRISPR-cas genome editing technology, the assembled biological parts are integrated into the genome of Z. mobilis. These biological parts including their compatibility will be characterized and further utilized for building PHB[3] or isobutanol production modules to convert waste paper cartons into renewable bioproducts. Finally, in order to create a highly predictable gene expression pattern to generate a high flux of transcription, we establish a biophysical model to predict the correlation between regulatory parts such as promoter and terminator sequences with their strength on gene expression. The success of our project will not only build up basic and composite parts for the non-model species, but also provide renewable bioplastics and biofuel precursors while protecting the campus environment.
Reference
1. Xia Wang, Qiaoning He, etc. Advances and prospects in metabolic engineering of Zymomonas mobilis. Metabolic Engineering. 2018;50:57-73.
2. Yongfu Yang, Wei Shen, Ju Huang, etc. Prediction and characterization of promoters and ribosomal binding sites of Zymomonas mobilis in system biology era. Biotechnol Biofuels. 2019; 12:52.
3. Mengyi Li, Xiangbin Chen, Xuemei Che, etc. Engineering Pseudomonas entomophila for synthesis of copolymers with defined fractions of 3-hydroxybutyrate and medium-chain-length 3-hydroxyalkanoates. Metabolic Engineering. 2018. 253-262.