Current metabolic engineering efforts often use one of two approaches: (1) Adding metabolic pathways for production target chemicals to model organisms (e.g., E. coli) or (2) Engineering non-model organisms that naturally produce a chemical or have other desirable traits such as chemical tolerance or broad substrate utilization. Limitations on traditional model organisms and the rapid development of synthetic biology techniques have generated broad interest in development of non-conventional microbial chassis for biotechnological production. Such efforts often focus on developing novel genetic tools to enable more versatile or high-throughput engineering of non-model organisms, but unique organisms often present unique challenges. This session will focus on recent efforts in the development of non-traditional bioproduction platforms in a diverse array of hosts, microbial consortia, or cell-free systems.

Bioengineering