Biobased Fuels and Chemicals: Biosynthetic Pathway Engineering & Enzymatic Conversion

Biofuels and biochemicals represent a secure, renewable, and environmentally responsible alternative to petroleum-derived fuels and chemicals. Abundant but historically recalcitrant feedstocks such as lignocellulosic biomass, the non-edible portion of plant-derived biomass, are promising substrates with great potential in industrial microbial fermentation to produce bulk chemicals. This session will focus on the biological production of biofuels and biochemicals from renewable feedstocks, with an emphasis on metabolic engineering of enzymatic or whole-cell biocatalysts. Projects describing novel metabolic products from renewable feedstocks or achievement of industrially-relevant yields, titers, and productivity are welcome. In addition, projects describing progress on biomass degradation, sugar utilization, lignin utilization, and microbial tolerance improvement to the inhibitors in lignocellulosic hydrolysates are particularly welcome.