Direct fermentation route for sustainable plastics and superabsorbent polymers

One of the grand challenges of our society today is to replace fossil-based production of chemicals and fuels by sustainable alternatives with a lower carbon footprint and less environmental impact.

Acrylic acid is a versatile building block for both commodity and specialty chemicals, including plastics, coatings, paints, superabsorbent polymers. Bio-based production of acrylic acid has been studied via combining fermentation with chemo-catalytic procedures.

However, wide-spread usage of renewable acrylic acid is hampered due to limited environmental gains and additional costs with chemical catalysts and purification steps in these chemo-catalytic processes.

The aim of this project is therefore to develop a yeast-based fermentation route for direct production of acrylic acid from renewable resources, such as cellulosic biomass.

This will be achieved by designing a novel synthetic approach to couple acrylic acid production with cell growth, so that the cell can only grow if acrylic acid is produced as a mandatory product.

With this growth-selectable phenotype we will perform directed evolution of the key enzymes to improve their efficiencies.

Furthermore, as this growth-coupled strategy can act as a significant driving force to direct carbon flux through the heterologous pathway leading to acrylic acid production, we will use adaptive laboratory evolution to further optimize yeast metabolism to achieve high-titer production of acrylic acid.