Event
ChBE Seminar Series: Ka-Yiu San
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Room 2110, Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Bldg.
Professor Ganesh Sriram
(301) 405-1261
gsriram@umd.edu
Manipulating and Balancing Reducing Equivalents Through Metabolic Engineering
Presented by Ka-Yiu San
E. D. Butcher Professor
Department of Bioengineering
Rice University
Producing fuels and chemicals from renewable resources has attracted increasing interest in the last few years. Metabolic engineering techniques have the potential to design more efficient strains leading to improved process performance, in terms of both yield and productivity. Little attention, however, has been paid to the importance of redox balance and the role of cofactors/coenzymes during the design and optimization process. In this presentation, the production of small molecules in Escherichia coli will be used as model systems to illustrate some of these important concepts. In particular, the biosynthesis of several chemicals will be used as examples to demonstrate the concept that cofactor engineering can be used as an additional metabolic engineering tool to improve process performance.