Alcohol Platform; biobased alcohols as platform for production of high-value chemicals and advanced biofuels (KB-32-001-018)

This project will develop several novel microbial processes for production of high-value alcohols from various waste streams such as syngas, municipal solid waste, agricultural biomass, etc. Synthetic biology principles will be used at the single cell level and at the microbial community level to develop these microbial processes using the recent findings at WR-FBR and WU-MIB on metabolic engineering of Clostridium beijerinckii and on using a Clostridium consortium for conversion of syngas to hexanol. The various alcohols that we will be able to produce with these anaerobic cultures isopropanol, (iso)butanol, pentanol and hexanol - will be converted catalytically or enzymatically to various aldehydes, longer-chain alcohols, diols, amines, esters and ethers that are used as chemical building blocks or end products in the chemical, Food & Feed, cosmetic, materials or transportation industry.