Engineering electron metabolism in cyanobacteria
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Photosynthesis offers tremendous promise for driving sustainable production of the chemicals our society requires. Recent years have seen many inspiring demonstrations of an array of biochemical pathways in photosynthetic hosts, but progress has been limited by a lack of foundational engineering capabilities. We have made advances along two avenues towards using photosynthesis for sustainable chemical production: metabolic engineering of a cyanobacterium to produce hydrogen from sunlight, and new procedures to make cyanobacteria easier to engineer. As a metabolite, hydrogen is unique. The pathway is rather simple, just one reaction away from a major product of photosynthetic electron transport. What is complex is the enzyme that catalyzes the hydrogen production reaction. We describe two projects to prepare a cyanobacterial host to express a complex foreign hydrogenase: upregulating the synthesis of iron-sulfur clusters required for electron transfer, and developing the ability to express proteins anaerobically. Both are ultimately connected to electron metabolism. Our work and that of others has been hindered by the relatively limited state-of-the-art of cyanobacterial engineering. Thus, we made parallel efforts to improve two fundamental operations in the strain engineering cycle: transformation with foreign DNA and cell lysis for intracellular analysis. This resulted in a simple procedure to reliably lyse cyanobacteria for high-throughput and small-sample applications.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2015 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Mehta, Kunal K |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Bioengineering. |
| Primary advisor | Swartz, James R |
| Thesis advisor | Swartz, James R |
| Thesis advisor | Bhaya, Devaki, 1957- |
| Thesis advisor | Bryant, Zev David |
| Thesis advisor | Covert, Markus |
| Advisor | Bhaya, Devaki, 1957- |
| Advisor | Bryant, Zev David |
| Advisor | Covert, Markus |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Kunal K Mehta. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Bioengineering. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2015. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2015 by Kunal K Mehta
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