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Volume 7, Issue 3(Suppl)
J Biotechnol Biomater, an open access journal
ISSN: 2155-952X
Euro Biotechnology 2017
September 25-27, 2017
17
th
EURO BIOTECHNOLOGY CONGRESS
September 25-27, 2017 Berlin, Germany
Improved lipid biosynthesis in
E. coli
through heterologous expression of a plant thioesterase
David Bolonio, Angela Contreras, Alvaro Vinuesa, Laureano Canoira
and
Luis Gómez
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
A
dvanced biodiesel is an alternative fuel prepared from renewable non-food sources of biomass. It is non-toxic, non-flammable,
biodegradable, and compatible with current vehicles and infrastructure. Most efforts to develop advanced biodiesel have focused
on the metabolic engineering of microorganisms able to efficiently convert lignocellulosic and waste biomass into fuel molecules.
The enterobacterial,
Escherichia coli
is well suited for this purpose owing to its exceptional amenability for genetic manipulation.
Indeed, it has already been used for commercial synthesis of a wide array of chemicals. This work addresses two key steps for biodiesel
production in E. coli: (i) increasing the total yields of free fatty acids (FAA) and (ii) improving FAA length and unsaturation from
an applied standpoint. These properties must be carefully optimized in order to obtain optimum engine performance once FAAs are
converted into esters or biodiesel. To this end,
E. coli
cells were genetically modified to express in an inducible fashion, a leaderless
version of the enzyme thioesterase I (tesA), which cleaves the fatty acyl-carrier protein and deregulates the tight product inhibition
typical of fatty acid synthesis, the transcription factor FadR, which down-regulates several genes in the fatty acid degradation pathway
and increases fatty acid unsaturation; and a plant acyl-ACP thioesterase (FatA) showing higher hydrolytic activity towards oleoyl-
ACP than the endogenous bacterial enzyme. As a result of the above manipulations we report here a 6-fold increase in FAA yield and
a significant improvement of one of the most important properties of biodiesel: The cold flow performance.
Biography
David Bolonio is a third year PhD student. He graduated in Mining Engineering at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain) and holds a Master’s Degree in
Environmental Research and Modeling and Risk Assessment from the same university. He has performed research at the School of Chemistry of the University
of Graz (Austria) and the Joint Bioenergy Institute of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (USA). His results have been presented in seven peer-reviewed
conferences and four research papers published in international journals.
david.bolonio@upm.esDavid Bolonio et al., J Biotechnol Biomater 2017, 7:3(Suppl)
DOI: 10.4172/2155-952X-C1-076