Discovery and development of new non-model bacterial chassis for biotechnological applications

Abstract

The construction of an economy centered on biotechnology, agriculture and biodiversity, will make it possible to replace products that are currently made using fossil fossils. Thus, the search and development of new biocatalysts are essential for the establishment of sustainable industrial processes. In the last decade, advances in several disciplines allowed metabolic engineers and synthetic biologists to design and implement the production of different types of biomolecules in microorganisms. However, there are still two main limitations in the area: (I) the lack of microbial chassis with intrinsically enhanced biochemical or physiological properties to optimize industry-specific processes, and (II) a limited collection of biological parts for genetic edition of unconventional microbial hosts. Thus, the present project aims to obtain ideal microbial cells in which synthetic circuits of biotechnological interest can be implanted using two different and complementary approaches. On the one hand, the prospecting of new bacterial chassis will be carried out by isolating them from abundant and cheap carbon sources. Then, their genomes will be sequenced and biological parts and molecular tools will be characterized for some of the new isolated bacteria, chosen according to the genes and metabolic pathways of interest. On the other hand, the second approach aims to make use of biological data mining in order to seek new tools for the genetic manipulation of Pseudomonas putida, a Gram-negative bacterium with emerging industrial properties, as well as new genes that can give greater robustness to microorganisms under extreme conditions, as needed in industrial bioprocesses. (AU)