Poster abstracts

Poster number 104 submitted by Wenyan Jiang

Metabolic and process engineering of Clostridium tyrobutyricum for isopropanol production

Wenyan Jiang (MCDB Program), Shang-Tian Yang (Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering)

Abstract:
Isopropanol is one of the most widely used solvents in the world. It is also one of the secondary alcohols that can be used as a direct or partial replacement for gasoline. Since the metabolic pathways and regulation of natural isopropanol producing strains are not well known, the final isopropanol titer can not satisfy rapidly increasing industrial demand. In this work, we studied the feasibility of enabling Clostridium tyrobutyricum to produce isopropanol. C. tyrobutyricum is an anaerobic acidogen which can convert glucose and xylose to acetate and butyrate. Plasmids were constructed with C. acetobutylicum ctf (acetoacetyl-CoA transferase), adc (acetoacetate decarboxylase) and C. beijerinckii adh (secondary alcohol dehydrogenase) genes. The plasmids were transformed into C. tyrobutyricum wild type, ack (acetate kinase) knockout, pta (phosphotransacetylase) knockout and ptb (phosphotransbutyrylase) knockout. The abilities of isopropanol production of these mutants were compared. And process engineering was perfomed to further boost final isopropanol titer, yield and productivity.

Keywords: isopropanol, biofuel, C tyrobutyricum