High-Throughput Engineering of Carbon Transport in the Carbon Concentrating Mechanism
Abstract
The atmospheric concentration of the key greenhouse gas CO2 has reached an alarmingly high level (>450 ppm), contributing significantly to climate change and posing severe health risks to human. Engineering biological carbon fixation, a natural process used by living organisms to convert inorganic carbon (CO2) into organic compounds, is a promising green solution towards utilizing atmospheric CO2 as an abundant and renewable resource for biochemicals and energy production. Nonetheless, the limited performance of natural carbon fixing pathways represents a key bottleneck for commercially viable scale-up of carbon fixation. We hypothesize that combinatorial refactoring, the re-design of natural metabolic pathways using new genetic parts, is a promising synthetic biology approach that can be leveraged to solve this challenge. In this research, we propose to couple combinatorial refactoring with whole cell biosensing to develop a new platform technology for the high-throughput refactoring of carbon fixing pathways in E. coli. Briefly, novel pH-biosensors will be developed to allow the detection of intracellular proton concentration, a signal that can be directly correlated to the cellular carbon concentrating and fixing efficiency. The optimized whole-cell pH-sensing platform will then be utilized to screen the improved variants of natural carbon fixing pathways, which are built from various combinations of regulatory elements. We envision that this research will lead to a new understanding and approaches to improve carbon fixing efficiency in microorganisms, which can be applied to resolve the current problems posed by the rapid elevation of atmospheric CO2 levels.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- May 13, 2019
- Source ID
- W911NF1910320
Entities
People
- Matthew Chang
Organizations
- Army Contracting Command
- National University of Singapore
- United States Army