Grant: Engage Grants Program

Designer Microbes Inc. (DMI) (http://www.designermicrobes.com/), a company specialized in creating custom microbial strains for various applications (sustainable energy production, agriculture, aquaculture, etc.) is known for its development of innovative methods to enable the engineering of microbes especially one that are not currently established as model systems. To date, many fuels, pharmaceuticals, flavors and fragrances products are extracted from plants. These valuable plant products (PPs) are often produced in low quantities and seasonal dependent growth can cause supply depletion. Thus, there is much interest in the genetic engineering for the development of microbial platforms to produce specific PPs. Microalgae are well-known systems for genetic engineering and are suitable hosts for the reconstitution of complex plant pathways. Recently, marine diatoms have gained much attention as they are expected to be a promising resource for the sustainable production of biofuels and biocompounds. Although the genetic tools are available to create diatom photosynthetic cell factories, the reconstitution of heterologous metabolic pathways has never been reported. DMI wishes to test their powerful molecular tools in order to exploit microbial biochemistry for the introduction of heterologous pathway and the production of novel compounds. This genetic engineering project aims to use DMI new genetic tools and innovative engineering methods to create marine diatom platforms for the production of valuable PPs. This project is not only motivated to provide a proof of concept for the introduction of entire plant pathway in diatoms but also by consumer demand for products that are environmentally friendly, less expensive, and possess properties similar or superior with those generated by PPs.