Bacterial Engineering Project: Creating a sustainable, butanol-producing bacteria

Published on June 15, 2021

This project was initiated in my final year of undergraduate school, where my team and I aimed to bioengineer a novel bacteria capable produce butanol. Although there were already companies doing this, we believed that our new design would be able to produce it at a higher efficiency. This year-long project resulted in the completion of the bacteria design, as well as planning for all experimental procedures and safety.

Problem

The current issue with energy production is it heavily relies on unsustainable sources of fuel, such as fossil fuels. Others have proposed the use of biofuels (fuel produced using environmentally friendly sources such as crops). Currently, this technology is heavily influenced by external factors such as crop price, crop production and the weather. Hence, we wanted to create a biomodified bacterium capable of producing butanol, specifically a strain called C. Acetobutylicum aiming to reduce the volatility of biofuel production.

To do this, we needed to improve the efficiency of butanol production, and reduce the production of unwanted side-products. Thus, this would also improve the sustainability of current biobutanol methods and reduce its dependency on external factors.

Technology and design

To create a butanol producing bacteria, it requires genetic engineering. For our specific model, we decided to us a C. Acetobutylicum strain and decided to introduce two different modificiations:

1. Knockout of adc gene to increase butanol production
2. Overexpression of Spo0A1 gene to enhance tolerance towards solvent toxicities