Intellectual Merit - This project aims to develop novel approaches for generating industrially important strains for the production of chemicals and other metabolites, including biofuels. The concept is termed Differentiation Engineering, which is defined here based on its goals: to probe and understand the underlying signal-transduction of differentiation thus enabling genetic or other alterations of cellular differentiation in order to achieve desirable cellular phenotypes.
Broader Impacts - The Differentiation Engineering approaches described in the proposal can be applied to other clostridia and other differentiating organisms. In addition, the knowledge generated from this project will make a significant contribution to basic biology, differentiation and genomics of all clostridia and of other sporulating, but not well-understood, organisms. Finally, this project provides unique opportunities for student education and training in an interdisciplinary environment on genetic engineering for strain development, prokaryotic flow cytometry, experimental and computational genomics, and bioreaction engineering.
