Current project

Synthetic biology can be used to engineer biotechnologically important pathways into microbes, allowing them to produce commodity chemicals from renewable resources. A bottleneck for such bioprocesses is optimizing the pathway for maximum yield subject to variable culture conditions. Poor yield hurts the economic viability of the bioprocess – making green technology cost prohibitive in comparison to nonrenewable options. Further, the hardware required to study and optimize these processes is costly and complicated. This makes it inaccessible to many iGEM teams and smaller research groups. As a result, research is slowed down, datasets remain small and inconsistent, and true high-throughput optimization of bioproduction remains out of reach.Our solution is the construction of a modular Bioreactor (Chemostat) that measures process parameters, including the yield, through ratiometric biosensors. We couple this to a specially engineered bacterial bioproduction strain that can use inducers to adjust the expression strength of individual genes in a production pathway. Importantly, this strain is designed so that the production pathway can be easily replaced, enabling the production of any commodity chemical. Our system reads the reactor yield parameters in real time, and enables us to adjust the flow of inducers into the reactor, allowing the yield to be optimized, even if the process conditions change. Additionally our own chemostat lowers costs drastically. At just a fraction of the usual price, our modular chemostat is not only easier to use, but can also be built by anyone with our instructions. By lowering the barrier to entry, we aim to make sustainable research more accessible.

We demonstrate the practical utility of our solution through two engineered bacterial strains that produce vanillin – a biotechnologically important chemical - and kaempferol which possesses anticancer potential. Our system can optimize the vanillin and kaempferol production yield, opening the door to cost-competitive green biotechnology.