Projects

Principal Investigator

• 

Team Members - CEB

• 
• 
• 

Fellowship Members - CEB

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Abstract

Saccharomyces cerevisiae is one of the most widely used cell factories in industrial biotechnology. However, the development of optimized yeast strains for the production of novel compounds is a time-consuming process and represents a significant cost/time burden. Key underlying reasons include the unavailability of suitable chassis cells and lack of proven modelling tools. DeYeastLibrary project aims at contributing towards overcoming these limitations by using cutting-edge computational and experimental tools. We will build upon the fact that, despite the large chemical diversity of desired biochemical products, the number of cellular pre-cursor metabolites and co-factors needed for their synthesis is relatively small. We will systematically exploit this modular design principle of nature and construct a pre-optimized yeast chassis cell library. By using this modularity concept, we will develop high-producing cell factories for 4 flagship products, viz., vanillin, poly-hydroxybutyrate (PHB), n-butanol and succinate, for which the consortium already possesses producing strains. The project will achieve its goals by bringing together leading experts in yeast genetics, metabolic engineering and mathematical modelling.