Engineering Biology
Energy Challenge:

Produce affordable and clean energy.

Enable production of energy-dense and carbon-neutral transportation fuels from lignocellulosic feedstocks, oil crops, and agriculture and municipal wastes.

Engineering Biology Objectives & Technical Achievements

Develop enzymes that can readily deconstruct lignin and cellulose/hemicellulose to monomers.

Engineering DNA Biomolecular Engineering Host Engineering Data Science

High-throughput synthesis of large gene clusters (> 10 kilobases).

Engineer enzymes/pathways for production of hydrocarbons, including decarboxylating/decarbonylating enzymes, cofactor changes on enzymes, and new pathways/enzymes that conserve carbon/energy.

Engineer transporters to facilitate fuel export from the cell.

Improving enzymes for deconstruction of cellulosic biomass, including engineering cellulases and ligninases to be functional and stable in complex environments.

Engineer microbes and/or consortia to efficiently express and secrete deconstruction enzymes.

Technoeconomic and life cycle analysis models to determine sustainability of energy production.

Enzyme engineering models.

BioCAD models for designing gene expression.

Further develop and advance oil crops that produce biofuels.

Engineering DNA Biomolecular Engineering Host Engineering Data Science

Edit chromosomes of oil crops to accumulate more and different types of oils.

Engineer fatty acid synthases to produce fuels (fats) of a particular molecular weight.

Engineer oil crops to be drought tolerant and not require significant inputs of fertilizer.

Accurate prediction of factors leading to increased yields for oil crops.

Develop crops suited to specific climates (particularly marginal lands that would not be used to grow food) that require little water or fertilizer and can be readily deconstructed to aromatic and sugar monomers.

Engineering DNA Biomolecular Engineering Host Engineering Data Science

Plant chromosome synthesis.

Synthesis of complex (e.g., repeat) DNA.

Efficient CRISPR systems for plants.

Methods for efficiently editing organelle genomes.

Light energy conversion: engineer enzymes to more efficiently convert solar light to carbon/ATP.

Light capture: expand the range of solar spectrum wavelengths that can be captured by photosynthesis.

Improve CO2 fixation by reducing 2-phosphoglycolate produced by RuBISCO O2 fixation.

Nitrogen fixation in plants.

Phosphate solubilization in plants.

Drought-tolerance traits in biomass crops.

Stable gene delivery to all plant tissues via viral vectors for prototyping of genetic designs.

Additional tools for controlling gene expression in plants, including large-scale knockout of unnecessary (for a given application or a particular environment) plant genes and pathways.

Metabolic pathways for producing bioproducts in plants (e.g., non-fuel products that could improve economics).

Methods to target and engineer specific microorganisms in plant microbiomes.

Co-regulation of plant and microbiome genes.

Develop microbiomes to aid nutrient uptake and water retention in soil.

Models for identifying best geographic locations for energy crops.

Data collected at the plant- and field-level to understand growth and productivity.

Satellite imagery of plant productivity, land, and water use.

Technoeconomic and life cycle analysis models to determine sustainability of energy production.

BioCAD models for designing gene expression.

Metabolic flux analysis of engineered organisms.

Develop microorganisms that can transform sugar and aromatic monomers into hydrocarbon-based liquid transportation fuels.

Engineering DNA Biomolecular Engineering Host Engineering Data Science

Synthesize large clusters of genes that encode metabolic pathways for various products (fuels, commodity chemicals, specialty chemicals, etc) ready to be transformed into any microbial host.

Engineer transporters to facilitate fuel export from the cell.

Develop efficient pathways for production of liquid transportation fuels from metabolic intermediates.

Develop metabolic pathways in microbes that will allow them to simultaneously consume aromatic monomers (from lignin) and sugars.

Metabolic flux analysis of engineered organisms.

Models of microbes in bioreactors to predict performance.

Technoeconomic and life cycle analysis models to determine sustainability of energy production.

BioCAD models for designing gene expression.

Last updated: June 19, 2019 Back