Final Technical Report - Use of Systems Biology Approaches to Develop Advanced Biofuel-Synthesizing Cyanobacterial Strains
- Washington Univ., St. Louis, MO (United States)
The overall objective of this project was to use a systems biology approach to evaluate the potentials of a number of cyanobacterial strains for photobiological production of advanced biofuels and/or their chemical precursors. Cyanobacteria are oxygen evolving photosynthetic prokaryotes. Among them, certain unicellular species such as Cyanothece can also fix N2, a process that is exquisitely sensitive to oxygen. To accommodate such incompatible processes in a single cell, Cyanothece produces oxygen during the day, and creates an O2-limited intracellular environment during the night to perform O2-sensitive processes such as N2-fixation. Thus, Cyanothece cells are natural bioreactors for the storage of captured solar energy with subsequent utilization at a different time during a diurnal cycle. Our studies include the identification of a novel, fast-growing, mixotrophic, transformable cyanobacterium. This strain has been sequenced and will be made available to the community. In addition, we have developed genome-scale models for a family of cyanobacteria to assess their metabolic repertoire. Furthermore, we developed a method for rapid construction of metabolic models using multiple annotation sources and a metabolic model of a related organism. This method will allow rapid annotation and screening of potential phenotypes based on the newly available genome sequences of many organisms.
- Research Organization:
- Washington Univ., St. Louis, MO (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER)
- DOE Contract Number:
- SC0006870
- OSTI ID:
- 1314041
- Report Number(s):
- DOE-WUSTL-0006870
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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