The effects of climate change have made the need to develop sustainable production practices for biofuels and other chemicals imminent. The development of the green economy has also led to many industries voluntarily improving the sustainability of the products they produce. The microbial production of fatty acid-derived chemicals allows for the opportunity to reduce petroleum-based chemicals in the marketplace. However, for microbial produced chemicals to be industrially competitive, significant work is needed to improve the production capacity of industrial strains. There are a number of bottlenecks and challenges related to the production of various fatty acid derivatives that need to be addressed.
One of these key challenges relates to the source of the fermentation feedstock. While sources such as corn or sugar cane are currently common, these feedstocks compete with food supply and require nutrient-rich soils. The use of lignocellulosic feedstocks is preferred to combat this issue, however these feedstocks present their own unique challenges. Pretreatment is required to release fermentable sugars, and this process also results in various fermentation inhibitors released into the solution. A better understanding of how engineered strains utilize these fermentable sugars as well as improving resistance to the inhibitors will help to improve the chemical production capacity of these chemical products. This work will focus on describing key bottlenecks related to fatty acid-derived products, while also evaluating proposed solutions to these bottlenecks. / Master of Science / Currently, many common household products and plastics are developed using petroleum-based components. From plastic bottles to common cosmetics, these contain ingredients that are derived from petroleum. In order to combat our reliance on petroleum for these every day products, it is essential to develop alternate sources for these materials. A potential source involve using plant material and by-products to produce these same compounds that we are able to produce from petroleum.
While there has been significant research to produce useful products such as bioethanol from corn, this is not an ideal crop. Corn requires more water and space than other crops such as grasses. In addition, these grasses can grow in soil that food crops are unable to grow in, so we don’t utilize valuable land to develop common household products. However, these grasses are much more difficult to treat and process in order to form these basic chemical ingredients.
In order to use grass-based crops, it is possible to engineer organisms such as yeast to process the raw material into valuable chemical precursor. This work aims to genetically engineer yeast in order to produce some of these chemical precursors from a grass-like feedstock. In addition, this work also analyzes how physical characteristics of yeast affect the final product formation. Finally, a model was developed to show how yeast ferments corn-like and grass-like feedstocks differently.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/82720 |
| Date | 30 March 2018 |
| Creators | Bland, Katherine Elizabeth |
| Contributors | Biological Systems Engineering, Senger, Ryan S., Zhang, Chenming, Hauf, Silke |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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