This project proposes to develop a novel biosensing-metrological method to identify improved microbial systems for the improvement of feedstock utilization to produce fermentable sugars from renewable plant materials, and for the conversion of those sugars into advanced biofuels. The world is facing a serious global energy crisis that demands the urgent development of alternative energy sources. The creation of a renewable biofuels industry is a promising option that has the great potential to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and mitigate the threat of climate change. A sustainable biofuels industry requires organisms that efficiently convert either plant-derived sugars or solar energy directly into commercially-relevant liquid fuels; fortunately advances in synthetic biology and biomolecular engineering provide the potential for microorganisms to be tailored to convert simple sugars and sunlight into fuels at industrial scales.
These biomolecular engineering tools demand the generation and screening of large populations of variants containing different combinations of mutations, genes, and metabolic pathways. However, the success of these methods is currently limited by the high cost and low speed of current screening technologies. The research objective is to apply some recent advances in drop-based microfluidic technology to develop a general platform for quantifying important traits of microorganisms for biofuel production at extremely high-throughput. This method uses picoliter aqueous drops dispersed in inert oil as growth and measurement vessels for single organisms, which could enable measurements of millions of cells per hour with high sensitivity and dynamic range. This research is at the frontier of physical and biological sciences, and therefore has intellectual merit in both fields. The proposed research has the potential to offer an improvement over existing technologies of >103 in speed and >107 in cost. Improvements of this scale are rare in technological developments, with the only clear example being the semiconductor industry over the past 30 years, where million-fold increases in semiconductor fabrication has allowed entirely new applications for microprocessors. In the same way, it is believed that the advances here will have broad impact, and enable qualitatively new paths scientific inquiry. Furthermore, the potential increases in technology could bypass one of the major bottlenecks in the biofuels industry, which has far-reaching impacts socially, ecologically and politically.
