Time：Thursday 1:30 PM, December 3, 2015
Location：Conference room in Biotechnology Building
Lecturer：Professor Jens Nielsen
Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
Abstract:
Microbial fermentations are the core of biorefineries as this process ensures value addition when the raw material is converted to fuels and chemicals. The development of efficient cell factories that can be used as biocatalysts in microbial fermentations is often the most time consuming and R&D intensive part in the development of a biorefinery. Most current biorefineries involve ethanol production, but there is much interest for more valuable fuels like butanol and diesel. This can be done through simple replacement of the biocatalyst, which in this case is the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and replacement of the biocatalyst can often be done in a plug-and-play fashion with little requirement for retrofitting of the production facility.
Besides its classical application in the production of bread, beer, wine and bioethanol, S. cerevisiae is a widely used cell factory for the production of fine chemicals such as resveratrol, and for production of pharmaceutical proteins such as human insulin and vaccines. In connection with the development of biorefineries for fuels and chemicals, there is much interest to use yeast as a cell factory due to its general acceptance in the industry, its robustness towards contaminations, its high alcohol tolerance, and its low pH tolerance. Further advantages of using yeast are that a large number of molecular biology techniques, experimental databases and research infrastructure are available.
In this lecture tools for advancing the design and engineering of novel, efficient yeast biocatalysts will be presented. This will involve both a number of novel synthetic biology tools that allows for rapid reconstruction of heterologous pathways, for tuning expression using promoter libraries and different expression vectors. Also different tools from metabolic engineering will be presented, e.g. methods for flux quantification and mapping of flux control. Finally methods from systems biology will be presented, as these may offer completely computerized design of cell factories in the future using so-called genome-scale metabolic models. Examples for how the metabolism of yeast can be engineered for production of novel fuels and chemicals will be presented, and hence can serve as a platform cell factory in modern biorefineries.
Introduction:
Jens Nielsen has an MSc degree in Chemical Engineering and a PhD degree (1989) in Biochemical Engineering from the Danish Technical University (DTU). He established his independent research group in DTU and was appointed full Professor there in 1998. He was Fulbright visiting professor at MIT in 1995- 1996. At DTU he founded and directed Center for Microbial Biotechnology. In 2008 he was recruited as Professor and Director to Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, where he is currently directing a research group of over 50 people and the Life Science Area of Advance, which coordinates over 200 researchers from 5 departments. Prof. Nielsen has published over 500 research papers that have been cited over 15000 times (current H factor 59), co-authored over 40 books and invented over 50 patents. He has founded several companies that have raised more than 20 million € in venture capital. He has received numerous awards such as Charles D. Scott Award and Merck Award for Metabolic Engineering. He is member of the Academy of Technical Sciences in Denmark, National Academy of Engineering in USA, the Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in USA, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences.
Contact: Prof. Zongbao K. Zhao