Chemical Engineering Seminar

Engineering metabolic pathways for microbial fermentation presents a way to 1) perform chemistry difficult to do with conventional organic chemistry and 2) a route towards sustainability.  However, numerous challenges obstruct our ability to realize these promises.  Our work strives to develop solutions to these problems for producing molecules of interest.  I will discuss a few of these strategies  and a couple target products.  The first is the large family of natural products, benzylisoquinoline alkaloids (BIAs), that most famously contains the opiates codeine and morphine but also a multitude of other molecules with potential therapeutic activities, including antibiotic and anti-cancer activity.  Most of these molecules are naturally produced in vanishingly low concentrations in plants, thus production in a microbe offers the advantages of facile scale-up, genetic approaches for pathway reconstruction, and powerful synthetic biology tools.  The second target molecule is a natural indigo dye precursor to provide a green alternative to the current dirty chemical dyeing process.  Critical to this scheme is the addition of a chemical protecting group inside the production host cell to control when and where the chemical product is reactive.