There is increasing concern regarding alternative, sustainable energy sources, such as biofuels, to replace declining oil reserves. The abundance of lignocellulosic biomass makes it the only imaginable resource that can potentially substitute a substantial portion of the fossil fuels we use today, but current methods for producing biofuels from non-food crops are cost intensive and not economically viable. Synthetic biology provides several potential approaches for developing biologically mediated processes for the conversion of lignocellulosic biomass into biofuels. Such systems are based on engineered microbes that produce enzymes for catalysing the conversion of cellulose into fermentable sugars and subsequently into high value products. Effective degradation of cellulose requires multiple classes of enzyme working together. In naturally occurring cellulose degrading microbes, bioconversion is catalysed by a battery of enzymes with different catalytic properties. However, naturally occurring cellulases with multiple catalytic domains seem to be rather rare in known cellulose-degrading organisms. Using synthetic biology approaches, seven cellulases with multiple catalytic domains were engineered and tested to determine the usefulness of such chimeric enzymes to replace cloning of multiple enzymes for biomass conversion. Catalytic domains were taken from Cellulomonas fimi endoglucanases CenA, CenB and CenD, exoglucanase Cex, and β-glucosidase, Cfbglu as well as Cytophaga hutchinsonii cellodextrinase CHU2268. All fusions retained both catalytic activities of the parental enzymes. To investigate the benefits of fusion, Citrobacter freundii NCIMB11490 was transformed with either fused or non-fused enzymes and cultured with cellulose blotting papers as main carbon source. Cells expressing fusions of Cex with CenA or CenD reproducibly showed higher growth than cells expressing non-fused versions, as well as more rapid physical destruction of paper. The opposite was observed for the other combinations. Comparing two different Cex and CenA fusions, CxnA2, which contains two carbohydrate binding modules (CBMs), degraded filter paper faster and led to better growth than CxnA1, which contains only one CBM. It was observed that CxnA1 was exported to the supernatant of E. coli and C. freundii cultures, as also seen for Cex and CenA, although there is no clear biological mechanism for this. Monitoring of growth using colony counts is laborious, but the use of optical density is not possible for cellulose-based cultures as it is affected by the insoluble cellulose particles. The SYBR Green I/propidium iodide live/dead staining protocol was therefore evaluated for growth measurements and was found to allow rapid measurements of large numbers of samples. In conclusion, these studies have demonstrated a simple and useful method for making chimeric proteins from libraries of multiple parts. The results demonstrate that use of fusion proteins can improve biomass conversion in vivo, and could potentially reduce the necessity for cloning of multiple enzymes and improve product yields. A simple and effective method for monitoring growth of bacteria in turbid cultures using a fluorimeter has also been developed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:688054 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Duedu, Kwabena Obeng |
| Contributors | French, Chris ; Horsfall, Louise |
| Publisher | University of Edinburgh |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/1842/15903 |
Page generated in 0.0015 seconds