{"model":{"id":1780,"update_text":"Hi folks, I hope you enjoy this short update on our progress. Our goal is to produce the four-carbon alcohol, butanol. Others have accomplished this in other orgranisms before, like E. coli. Some organisms produce butanol naturally, like Clostridium acetobutylicum. No one has engineered our awesome microbe to produce butanol before, but since we have some examples of how it can be done in other organisms, we are confident we can do it in Haloferax volcanii. We went to the literature to find out as much as we could about H. volcanii. We recently found a bioinformatics paper that suggests archaea have a combined pathway for both building and consuming fatty acids (A. Mulkidjanian et al., 2014). Other life forms like bacteria and higher organisms have two distinct pathways. In archaea it looks like when fatty acids are being built and consumed they use different but related enzymes to extend the length of the fatty acids. The pathway functions like an assembly line, as the fatty acid progresses through the pathway the enzymes add two carbon chunks, and the fatty acid grows longer, from 2, to 4, to 6, and so on. If the theory is correct, we could stop the microbe from making fatty acids longer than what we want by deleting the genes responsible for those steps, from 4 to 6 (for example). In bacteria, this strategy might not work because the pathway is needed to produce essential lipids. We found published reports that show the genes that are responsible for making butyric acid (the 4-carbon fatty acid), and used the sequences of those genes to search for similar genes in H. volcanii. We have done similar work to find candidate genes that will turn butyric acid into butanol.
","title":"Bioinformatics Update","backers_only":false,"published_at":"2014-08-03T13:10:09.000-07:00","view_count":32,"publish_on":null,"url":"https://experiment.com/u/CwceqQ","image":null,"project_title":"Sustainable Next Generation Biofuel Production","project_link":"https://experiment.com/projects/sustainable-next-generation-biofuel-production","project_id":"sustainable-next-generation-biofuel-production","user_id":14620,"likes":2,"comments":0,"save_url":"/updates/save","editor":"redactor","citations":[],"new_record":false,"is_published":true,"is_draft":false,"save_path":"/updates/save","file_attachments":[],"tags":[],"text_to_be_jsonified_for_read":"Hi folks, I hope you enjoy this short update on our progress. Our goal is to produce the four-carbon alcohol, butanol. Others have accomplished this in other orgranisms before, like E. coli. Some organisms produce butanol naturally, like Clostridium acetobutylicum. No one has engineered our awesome microbe to produce butanol before, but since we have some examples of how it can be done in other organisms, we are confident we can do it in Haloferax volcanii. We went to the literature to find out as much as we could about H. volcanii. We recently found a bioinformatics paper that suggests archaea have a combined pathway for both building and consuming fatty acids (A. Mulkidjanian et al., 2014). Other life forms like bacteria and higher organisms have two distinct pathways. In archaea it looks like when fatty acids are being built and consumed they use different but related enzymes to extend the length of the fatty acids. The pathway functions like an assembly line, as the fatty acid progresses through the pathway the enzymes add two carbon chunks, and the fatty acid grows longer, from 2, to 4, to 6, and so on. If the theory is correct, we could stop the microbe from making fatty acids longer than what we want by deleting the genes responsible for those steps, from 4 to 6 (for example). In bacteria, this strategy might not work because the pathway is needed to produce essential lipids. We found published reports that show the genes that are responsible for making butyric acid (the 4-carbon fatty acid), and used the sequences of those genes to search for similar genes in H. volcanii. We have done similar work to find candidate genes that will turn butyric acid into butanol.
","project_milestones":[],"completed_milestones":[],"edit_milestones_path":"/projects/sustainable-next-generation-biofuel-production/wizard#milestone","base_path":"/projects/sustainable-next-generation-biofuel-production/updates/CwceqQ","class_name":"Update","json_for_read":null,"json_for_write":null,"slate_flag":false,"text_to_be_jsonified_for_write":"Hi folks, I hope you enjoy this short update on our progress. Our goal is to produce the four-carbon alcohol, butanol. Others have accomplished this in other orgranisms before, like E. coli. Some organisms produce butanol naturally, like Clostridium acetobutylicum. No one has engineered our awesome microbe to produce butanol before, but since we have some examples of how it can be done in other organisms, we are confident we can do it in Haloferax volcanii. We went to the literature to find out as much as we could about H. volcanii. We recently found a bioinformatics paper that suggests archaea have a combined pathway for both building and consuming fatty acids (A. Mulkidjanian et al., 2014). Other life forms like bacteria and higher organisms have two distinct pathways. In archaea it looks like when fatty acids are being built and consumed they use different but related enzymes to extend the length of the fatty acids. The pathway functions like an assembly line, as the fatty acid progresses through the pathway the enzymes add two carbon chunks, and the fatty acid grows longer, from 2, to 4, to 6, and so on. If the theory is correct, we could stop the microbe from making fatty acids longer than what we want by deleting the genes responsible for those steps, from 4 to 6 (for example). In bacteria, this strategy might not work because the pathway is needed to produce essential lipids. We found published reports that show the genes that are responsible for making butyric acid (the 4-carbon fatty acid), and used the sequences of those genes to search for similar genes in H. volcanii. We have done similar work to find candidate genes that will turn butyric acid into butanol.
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