Project properties
Title Ethanol bioconversion: what can we produce?
Group Systems and Synthetic Biology
Project type thesis
Credits 36
Supervisor(s) Prof. Maria Suarez Diez (SSB), Prof. Ruud Weusthuis (BPE
Examiner(s) Prof. Maria Suarez Diez (SSB), Prof. Ruud Weusthuis (BPE
Contact info robert1.smith@wur.nl
Begin date 2025/02/03
End date
Description Ethanol can be produced from fossil fuels or through sustainable methods such as fermentation of sugars or CO2 hydrogenation. Ethanol produced from gas (syngas) fermentation is already produced at the industrial scale and is currently considered an upcoming feedstock for microbial cell factories.
We want to explore the metabolic potential, limitations, and challenges of using ethanol to produce chemicals by bioconversion. We are willing to consider production of succinate, lactate, citrate, glutamate, lysine, 3-hydroxypropionate or proteins.
Prof. Weusthuis has started exploring this topic and has computed the maximum yields of these conversions, determined the Gs and the production equations. The Gs are positive and CO2 fixation is almost always needed. Microbial respiration is often required to provide additional energy.
The goal of this project is to evaluate suitable metabolic networks to optimally produce the target chemicals using ethanol as substrate. We will use the genome scale model of well-known organisms (such as Escherichia coli) and algorithms for gapfilling (such as Meneco) or retrobiosynthesis (such as Retropath) to design and evaluate new pathways.
All in all, the student that will work on this project will:
- Explore and select suitable gapfilling and retrobiosynthesis methods.
- Deploy selected methods considering ethanol as a substrate for bioproduction of targeted metabolites by E. coli.
- Evaluate the suitability of the suggested pathways.
Used skills Advanced methods for constraint based metabolic modelling and pathways design and evaluation.
Requirements Programming (python) and modelling microbial metabolism (such as: “MEIM: Metabolic engineering of industrial microorganisms BPE34306”.