Assessment of Metabolic Engineering in Bioprocess Engineering and Industrial Applications

The field of bioprocess engineering has become an increasingly popular route to produce chemicals and fuels in a sustainable fashion. Bioprocessing is an interdisciplinary field that joins chemical engineering, metabolic engineering, and synthetic biology to tackle problems that will arise from the ongoing use of products derived from non-renewable resources. This study will overlook two effective tools that are widely used in the bioprocessing field. The first tool that was studied was strain optimization for biochemical production. This involves genetic manipulation of microbial hosts to create strains that are more efficient at producing the desired products. The second tool that was studied was adaptive laboratory evolution which is used to enhance overall cellular fitness. Enhancing the overall fitness and efficiency of these microbial production factories, allows for innovation and growth in the biochemical industry. Creating sustainable and renewable solutions for both specialty and commodity chemicals.
Strain optimization was specifically studied by enhancing inorganic carbon uptake in synechococcus sp. 7002. It is desired to have both high flux and high affinity transport for the rapid and efficient uptake of HCO3- for enhanced cell growth. The results found that the regulatory gene for carbon transporters in synechococcus genome was successfully deleted. Increasing the toxicity limits of 2-Phenylethanol was done by using adaptive laboratory evolution (ALE). ALE is a widely used practice in biotechnology studies to gain insights on mechanisms of molecular evolution and to better define the functionality of microbial cell factories. It was found that after growing E. coli BW25113 under selective conditions the genome evolved for a higher fitness medium with an increased concentration of 2-Phenylethanol. Overall, two key tools used in bioprocess engineering were successful studied to gain a better insight on the future of biochemical production industry.