Microbes could advance green biomanufacturing

The team, led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley believes its work could provide a ‘powerful route to sustainable biochemicals’.

Recently announced in Nature, the advance uses bacteria to combine natural enzymatic reactions with a new-to-nature reaction called the ‘carbene transfer reaction’. The team believes the work could one day help to reduce industrial emissions because it offers sustainable alternatives to chemical manufacturing processes that typically rely on fossil fuels.

“What we showed in this paper is that we can synthesise everything in this reaction – from natural enzymes to carbenes – inside the bacterial cell. All you need to add is sugar and the cells do the rest,” said Jay Keasling, a principal investigator of the study and CEO of the US Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI).

Carbenes are highly reactive carbon-based chemicals that can be used in many different types of reactions. For decades, scientists have wanted to use carbene reactions in the manufacturing of fuels and chemicals, plus drug discovery and synthesis.