Using Synthetic Biology to Build Microbial Factories Producing Biofuels

Finding paths for sustainable energy production is one of the foremost challenges as worldwide demand is quickly growing and increased concern of climate effect due to increased concentration of greenhouse gasses. One promising direction, especially for production of liquid transportation fuels, is re-engineering the metabolism of microbes like baker's yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae to convert sugar into a chemical with desirable biofuel characteristics. A chief challenge is not only in building the metabolic pathway for performing this conversion but also making this conversion efficient while maintaining a healthy cell. I will describe work being done to produce biofuels using the rapidly emerging approaches of Synthetic Biology.

Speaker: John Dueber, UC Berkeley