Biofuels & Bioenergy

Biography

Biography: Carla Andreia Freixo Portela

Abstract

For the last few years, the production of butanol has been the focus of researchers’ attention when looking for alternatives to biofuels’ production. Interesting results have already been achieved with heterologous organisms such as Escherichia coli. However, native producers from clostridia group still presents the best alternative to succeed; as they possess all the machinery required and evolutionarily were optimized to produce butanol. However, there are several limitations that need to be assessed in order to control the production of other unwanted end-products such as ethanol, acetone, lactate or succinate that may deviate the fluxes away from butanol. Strategies of metabolic engineering have been on the table for over the last 15 years. However, the targets that seemed obvious at fi rst, have proven not to increment signifi cantly butanol titers showing that C. acetobutylicum metabolism is not as straightforward as it seemed. Going deep into understanding the solventogenic metabolism became therefore a key step into overcoming the diffi culties to channel the metabolism towards butanol production. In this work, we apply deep in silico analysis in order to learn and understand the peculiarities of this microorganism metabolism. Our study suggests a new in silico strategy to maximize butanol production.