Abstract
Synthetic biochemistry, the cell-free production of biologically based chemicals, is a potentially high-yield, flexible alternative to in vivo metabolic engineering. To limit costs, cell-free systems must be designed to operate continuously with minimal addition of feedstock chemicals. We describe a robust, efficient synthetic glucose breakdown pathway and implement it for the production of bioplastic. The system's performance suggests that synthetic biochemistry has the potential to become a viable industrial alternative.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by US DOE grant DE-FC02-02ER63421 and ARPA-E grant DE-AR0000556.
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All authors contributed to the system design, design of experiments and data analysis. P.O. and T.P.K. performed the experiments. All the authors wrote the paper.
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The authors have formed a company, Invizyne Technologies, that will seek to exploit cell-free technologies.
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Supplementary Results, Supplementary Figures 1 and 2, Supplementary Tables 1–3 and Supplementary Note. (PDF 438 kb)
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Opgenorth, P., Korman, T. & Bowie, J. A synthetic biochemistry module for production of bio-based chemicals from glucose. Nat Chem Biol 12, 393–395 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchembio.2062
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nchembio.2062
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