Project description
Specialisation in smaller tasks helps bacterial biotechnologists overcome big challenges
Harnessing bacterial biosynthetic pathways to produce natural compounds naturally sounds like a great idea, yet it faces important challenges. Given the tremendous complexity of the pathways and processes, they can be difficult to control and amplify in genetically engineered organisms. The venerable approach of 'divide and conquer' is the focus of the EU-funded MENTHOL project. The team will develop methods to produce bacteria derived from the same parent cell but having subpopulations specialised for executing specific steps in the pathways. This modular scheme exploiting metabolic heterogeneity will be used to produce commercially important natural compounds from waste cooking oils.
Objective
This proposal aims to change current paradigms of biotechnological production of complex plant natural compounds, specifically isoprenoids such as limonene, menthol, and p-cymene. MENTHOL main innovation lies in the synthetic decoupling of the complex biosynthetic pathways of these compounds into a distributed catalysis within monoclonal heterogeneous bacterial populations. Limonene and menthol are natural monoterpenes widely used as flavor and fragrance additives, while p-cymene is an important precursor in the bio-based production of terephthalic acid, a key precursor of Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET). Although they have been successfully produced by genetically engineered microorganisms, to reach industrial scale production there are still obstacles to overcome. On the one hand, the introduction of large biosynthetic pathways in a single bacterial strain may cause host unstable physiology and low performance; and on the other hand, the use of synthetic consortia to overcome this shortcoming can be limited by differences in the growth profile of species involved. This proposal is conceived as an alternative to avoid those obstacles, by decoupling the complex biosynthetic pathways of the target compounds into minimal functional modules, to be reassembled inside metabolically differentiated subpopulations of a single specie-based multifunctional bacterial culture. To achieve such ambitious goal, in this project we will applied cutting-edge systems and synthetic biology tools to engineer programmable metabolic heterogeneity inside a monoclonal population of Pseudomonas putida, to promote the division of labor during the production of limonene, menthol, and p-cymene using waste cooking oils as economic and reliable renewable feedstock.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencesbiological sciencessynthetic biology
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicinephysiology
- natural scienceschemical sciencescatalysis
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesmicrobiology
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
28006 Madrid
Spain