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
Released Data Link
Team
Principal Investigator
Team Members