Synthetic Biology of Halomonas Spp for Industrial Biotechnology

Synthetic Biology of Halomonas spp for Industrial Biotechnology

George Guo-Qiang Chen,

Tsinghua University, School of Life Sciences, Beijing 100084, China e-mail: chengq@tsinghua.edu.cn
Due to the disadvantages of bioprocesses including energy consuming sterilization, high fresh water consumption, discontinuous fermentation to avoid microbial contamination, highly expensive stainless steel fermentation facilities and competing substrates for human consumption, bioproduction is less competitive compared with chemical processes. Recently, halophiles have shown promises to overcome these shortcomings. Due to their unique halophilic properties, halophiles are able to grow in high pH and high NaCl containing medium as well as at high temperature, allowing fermentation processes to run contamination free under unsterile conditions and continuous way. At the same time, our lab has developed genetic manipulation and synthetic biology methods to engineer halophiles for various applications. So far, halophiles have been assembled to produce bioplastics, especially polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA), ectoines, enzymes, and bio-surfactants. Increasing effects have been made to engineer halophiles into a low cost platform for bioprocessing with advantages of low energy, less fresh water consumption, low fixed capital investment, and continuous production. This lecture will present genomic editing, new pathway introduction and morphology engineering for Halomonas spp for biomanufacturing purposes.

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Advance 10.1016/j.biotechadv.2014.10.008