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A synthetic biochemistry module for production of bio-based chemicals from glucose

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Abstract

Synthetic biochemistry, the cell-free production of biologically based chemicals, is a potentially high-yield, flexible alternative to in vivo metabolic engineering. To limit costs, cell-free systems must be designed to operate continuously with minimal addition of feedstock chemicals. We describe a robust, efficient synthetic glucose breakdown pathway and implement it for the production of bioplastic. The system's performance suggests that synthetic biochemistry has the potential to become a viable industrial alternative.

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Figure 1: The synthetic PBG pathway for the conversion of glucose to polyhydroxybutyrate.
Figure 2: Semicontinuous production of PHB.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by US DOE grant DE-FC02-02ER63421 and ARPA-E grant DE-AR0000556.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, UCLA-DOE Institute, Molecular Biology Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, USA

    Paul H Opgenorth, Tyler P Korman & James U Bowie

Authors
  1. Paul H Opgenorth
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  2. Tyler P Korman
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  3. James U Bowie
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the system design, design of experiments and data analysis. P.O. and T.P.K. performed the experiments. All the authors wrote the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to James U Bowie.

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Competing interests

The authors have formed a company, Invizyne Technologies, that will seek to exploit cell-free technologies.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Text and Figures

Supplementary Results, Supplementary Figures 1 and 2, Supplementary Tables 1–3 and Supplementary Note. (PDF 438 kb)

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Opgenorth, P., Korman, T. & Bowie, J. A synthetic biochemistry module for production of bio-based chemicals from glucose. Nat Chem Biol 12, 393–395 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchembio.2062

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