Publications Details

Carbon optimized production of 3-hydroxypropionic acid in the Agile BioFoundry organism Rhodosporidium toruloides

Liu, Di

The modern global economy relies heavily on carbon-based products that are derived from petroleum, which presents sustainability, resource management, and greenhouse gas exacerbated climate change challenges. Due to these challenges, there is the need for a global industrial transition towards green and sustainable production. Microbial production of valuable chemicals from renewable biomass represents one promising route. However, high-volume low-value products such as commodity chemicals are still difficult to make profitable. One fundamental bottleneck is a waste of more than 1/3 of the feedstock carbon as CO₂ in the fermentation process. Here the project focuses on fundamentally reconfiguring the metabolism to reduce CO₂ loss in central metabolic pathways thereby also improving bioproduct yields. Here we present technologies to prevent CO₂ loss and balance reducing equivalents within the cell to enable complete conversion of glucose from renewable feedstocks into bioproducts.