Using Yeast to Create Alternative Petrochemical Processes
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
As climate change continues to do more damage to our planet, scientists are working to find more efficient and cleaner ways to power the earth. One appealing alternative to common petrochemical processes that generate significant greenhouse gases and other waste products could come from biological systems.
Recent work from Northwestern Engineering's Michael Jewett and researchers from the University of Texas at Austin has led to advances in understanding of biochemical pathways and increased rates of chemical production by biological systems. The findings could bring us closer to implementing sustainable alternatives to synthesizing materials, fuels, and other oil-derived products.
The paper [...] describes the development of optimized in vitro biosynthesis (biochemical production) processes that use cell extracts from engineered strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae (brewer's yeast).
[...] Decades of metabolic studies and genetic tool development make S. cerevisiae a highly controllable framework for biochemical production. Beyond historical applications in baking and brewing, this yeast has been engineered to produce innumerable target molecules used in industrial and therapeutic applications.
However, cellular production systems have an internal tug-of-war between making more cells and making the engineered product. Jewett's group avoids these growth and viability constraints by breaking the biological machinery out of cells and using the extracted material for cell-free biochemical reactions, which enables the optimization of levers that are not easily tuned in living cells.
Journal Reference:
Blake J. Rasor, Xiunan Yi, Hunter Brown, et al. An integrated in vivo/in vitro framework to enhance cell-free biosynthesis with metabolically rewired yeast extracts [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-25233-y)
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.