JBEI researchers Balance Survival and Yield for Biotech Microbes

Biobased chemicals and fuels are often produced in microbes, but these products are often toxic to microbes, which limits their output. Chemist Aindrila Mukhopadhyay, of the DOE’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), has been working on a way around this by screening and genetically engineering a library of molecular “pumps” which constantly remove these toxic products from the cell, increasing the cell’s tolerance to these products. As a consequence, using this technology the researchers demonstrated that it can significantly increase yields of fuels and chemicals from bacteria; reducing costs for refiners and making manufacturing by microbial fermentation a more practical option.