(342f) Engineering Synthetic Pathways For Production Of Butanol As Biofuels

Global energy and environmental problems has stimulated increased effort in synthesizing biofuels from renewable resources. Compared to the common biofuel-ethanol, higher-order alcohols may offer advantages as gasoline substitutes because of higher energy contents and higher hydrophobicity. Here we present a metabolic engineering approach to produce butanol in a user-friendly microorganism. We built a synthetic pathway to convert glucose to butanol. Moreover, we improved the productivity by combining gene deletion and overexpression techniques. This work demonstrates the metabolic engineering principles in producing biofuels beyond those naturally accumulated to high quantities in microbial fermentation.