Highly Efficient Production of Advanced Biofuel by Metabolically Engineered Microorganism
(Science Daily/The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)…Utilizing systems metabolic engineering, a Korean research team at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) has succeeded in demonstrating an optimized process to increase butanol production by generating an engineered bacterium.
…Distinguished Professor Sang Yup Lee at the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, KAIST, a premier science and engineering university in Korea, Dr. Do Young Seung at GS Caltex, a large oil refining company in Korea, and Dr. Yu-Sin Jang at BioFuelChem, a startup butanol company in Korea, applied a systems metabolic engineering approach to improve the production of butanol through enhancing the performance of Clostridium acetobutylicum, one of the best known butanol-producing bacteria.
…Systems metabolic engineering, which allows metabolic engineering at a systems-level, is employed for designing and optimizing cellular metabolic and regulatory networks to induce the most efficient production of target bioproducts.
…Butanol is naturally produced by some anaerobic bacteria, but the efficiency of its production could not match that of ethanol due to the high toxicity of butanol to host organisms and the production of byproducts such as acetone and organic acids. READ MORE Abstract
