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Developing efficient fungal biocatalysts for on-site enzyme production and for production of chemical building blocks in biorefineries using metabolomic and secretomic profiling


EMSL Project ID
44658

Abstract

Development of biocatalysts for sustainable production of bioactive molecules from lignocellulosic plant biomass in biorefineries is a rapid growing research area. One of the most important and difficult technological challenges for exploitation of the biomass is to overcome its recalcitrance by pretreatment and enzymatic hydrolysis to produce fermentative sugars for further processing. Filamentous fungi naturally produce and secrete a variety of different products such as enzymes, hydrocarbons, antibiotics, sterols, polyketide pigments and organic acids. Due to their versatile enzyme secretion, they could potentially be developed into biocatalysts that utilize the biomass directly. The project focuses on saccharification of plant biomass and production of top-priority chemical building blocks using novel fungal strains with highly efficient enzymes and capacity to organic acid production. Three promising fungal strains have been selected through screening programs where fungi were grown under different growth conditions, including lignocellulosic biomass. Using the EMSL facilities to explore integrated top down and bottom-up secretome analysis of these selected strains will give us insight in their enzymatic apparatus and will facilitate the discovery of powerful biomass degrading enzymes. Secretome analysis will be combined with extracellular metabolic footprinting for studying the degradation of carbohydrates. Metabolic pathway engineering is applied for developing one of the fungal strains into an efficient biocatalyst that efficiently produces organic acids directly from biomass. This research will be greatly advanced by using the EMSL facility to explore the metabolic carbon flux of our mutants and wildtype by analyzing intra- and extracellular metabolites by NMR from the fungi and their culture filtrates when grown on 13C labeled glucose.

Project Details

Project type
Large-Scale EMSL Research
Start Date
2011-10-01
End Date
2014-09-30
Status
Closed

Team

Principal Investigator

Mette Lubeck
Institution
Aalborg University

Team Members

Marta Zoglowek
Institution
Aalborg University

Niels Hansen
Institution
Aalborg University

Annette Sørensen
Institution
Washington State University Tri-Cities

Peter Lubeck
Institution
Aalborg University

Birgitte Ahring
Institution
Washington State University Tri-Cities

Angela Norbeck
Institution
Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory