Can Microbial Factories provide Genetic Switching for Biochemicals?

“The ability to switch on bacteria into chemical production mode permanently is a massive step forward to realising economically viable scale up of chemical production from microbes,” – Ahmad Mannan.

Producing high value chemicals which are used daily for almost everything from food preservatives to pharmaceuticals, is a costly process; industrial chemistry processes currently use fossil fuels which account for around 14% of all greenhouse gas emissions. The synthesis of many of these petrochemical derivatives also require expensive chemical switching, or inducers, to achieve end results, limiting commercial  potential in a process that is unsustainable.

Rerouting bacterial chemistry

An exciting alternative is to engineer bacteria as “cell-factories” with a genetic switch that reroutes their chemistry to produce high-value chemicals, such as biofuels, polymers and pharmaceuticals and researchers from the University of Warwick have found a cheap way to switch bacteria into chemical production mode.

Led by Dr Ahmad Mannan and Professor Declan G. Bates from Warwick’s Integrative Synthetic Biology Centre at the School of Engineering, new theoretical research investigated how biosensors from E. coli that respond to cheap natural nutrients like oleic acid can be harnessed to create switches. Using mathematical models and the engineering principles of feedback control loops, commonly used in flight control systems, they discovered how to design a genetic switch in bacteria that removes the reverting “spring”, so that adding only a pulse of a cheap natural nutrient can switch the cell to chemical production mode permanently – drastically cutting costs.

Versatility for synthetic biology toolbox

Dr Mannan said: “The ability to switch on bacteria into chemical production mode permanently is a massive step forward to realising economically viable scale up of chemical production from microbes. The switch should be widely applicable to many industrially relevant microbes and for the synthesis of almost any chemical – a versatile component in the Synthetic Biology toolbox. The next steps of our research would be to uncover the principles to understand where in the chemical roadmap to apply this “traffic light” and perhaps look to collaborating with industry where it could be readily incorporated into existing fermentation processes.”

Professor Bates added: “Using cutting-edge synthetic biology techniques our work has laid out the framework for constructing the proposed irreversible switch in the lab. Not only could our work change the way chemical industries make high-value chemicals, it also contributes to the larger vision for how humans can move away from reliance on non-renewable resources, to enabling sustainable synthesis of biochemicals, for a greener, cleaner future.”

‘Designing an irreversible metabolic switch for scalable induction of microbial chemical production’, is published in the journal Nature Communications,

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