Sustainability through synthetic biology by Brian Pfleger
 n the past century, fossil fuels have revolutionized everyday life for people worldwide by providing abundant energy and inexpensive chemical feedstocks. Unfortunately, fossil fuel supplies are finite and society cannot maintain this unsustainable form of energy and chemical production. My research interest is the development of synthetic biology tools to convert renewable resources into molecules with significant social, economic, and scientific value. Sunlight, the most abundant energy source on the planet, can meet our energy demands many times over, but the challenge of solar energy is its conversion into a usable form.
Photosynthetic organisms have solved this problem by evolving the machinery needed to efficiently convert sunlight into chemical bonds. In order to take advantage of this process, the outputs of photosynthesis (biomass) must be efficiently converted into desired fuels and chemicals. Synthetic biology, the study of biological systems as an assembly of parts, offers the ability to engineer microbial metabolism to do just that
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Microbial metabolism is a complex and integrated network of chemical reactions that can generate many small molecules from simple precursors. As such, a microbial cell can be compared to a chemical factory where chemical inputs are converted into products through reaction systems that can be designed and controlled to meet specifications.
The field of synthetic biology has emerged to study the design and construction of new biological systems from the assembly of known biological parts. By studying the parts needed to convert biomass into chemicals, engineers can assemble new factories to efficiently synthesize fuels, medicines, solvents, materials and other specialty chemicals.
The first students in my lab are studying enzymes for the production of biodiesel and bioplastics as well as developing tools to utilize cellulose and carbon dioxide as inputs. Down the road, they will integrate these parts into microbial hosts to generate novel schemes for the sustainable production of chemicals.
Research in synthetic biology is highly collaborative and requires knowledge beyond that received in the chemical engineering curriculum. Excitingly, researchers in my lab will have the opportunity to integrate with the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC), a new Department of Energy center housed in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. The GLBRC provides my group with access to funding, facilities (including fermentation and high throughput screening), and collaborations with experts in the life sciences. Within chemical engineering, students in my lab will also collaborate with other CBE faculty to integrate synthetic biology research with ongoing work in biotechnology, catalysis, materials science, nanotechnology and computational modeling.
With respect to modeling studies, the addition of Jennifer Reed to the department faculty is particularly advantageous. Students in my lab will have the opportunity to work with Jennie’s metabolic models in order to analyze the complex network of microbial metabolism. Students can then propose hypotheses based on in silico results and test them in the laboratory.
The outcome of these experiments will guide the design of sustainable processes engineered through synthetic biology. These unique resources, available only at UW-Madison, create an ideal environment for students to develop sustainable technologies and bring them into practice.
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