Escherichia coli is the common chassis for synthetic biology, but I chose Bacillus subtilis as my platform for building an ethylene glycol utilisation system. Similar to the ethanol utilisation pathway that I previously worked on, the ethylene glycol utilisation pathway is also a two-gene pathway that regenerates two NADH per turn of the pathway.
To build a substrate utilisation system, the microbe must first uptake and be able to use the substrate. Thus, efforts in the project are to first figure out the concentration range of ethylene glycol in which B. subtilis would uptake the substrate. Despite much experimentation, uptake of ethylene glycol by B. subtilis was poor, which points to significant amount of engineering effort to first construct an uptake system comprising suitable transporters, and then downstream optimisation experiments to reduce the toxicity of ethylene glycol.
Category: biochemistry, molecular biology, systems biology, synthetic biology, microbiology,
Tags: ethylene glycol, substrate utilisation pathway, Bacillus subtilis, uptake system, transporter, NADH regeneration,
Looking at life with a scientific lens 