Tbox4BioProd

Advances in biotechnological processes are crucial for addressing the numerous challenges of a sustainable bioeconomy, especially in the face of climate change uncertainties. Despite progress in bioengineering, significant scientific and technological obstacles remain to fully exploit the potential of bioproduction.

Achieving high yields of compounds of interest using microbial platforms remains a challenge. Two key challenges need to be addressed:

• High-Yield Production of Metabolic Compounds: Avoid metabolic burden, reduce the toxicity of heterologous pathways, design new systems to lower the cost and toxicity of chemical inducers, enable dynamic control of the metabolic network.
• Stable Production Over Extended Fermentation Periods: Mitigate genomic instability, slow down evolutionary drift, reduce population heterogeneity, enable division of labor by stabilizing bacterial communities.

Project objectives

A toolkit for host engineering and controlled control of heterologous pathways:

• Marker-free and cross-species genome engineering tools to mitigate genomic instability and evolutionary drift.
• Genetic modules for multi-level dynamic control to reduce cellular burden, toxicity of heterologous pathways, and population heterogeneity.
• Industry-compatible induction methods: short-pulse induction of memory switches to reduce the cost and toxicity of chemical inducers.

Strategies for engineering and maintaining synthetic bacterial communities:

• Synthetic communities of one or more species with complex metabolic co-dependencies to enable division of labor.
• Directed evolution to stabilize the genomes of modified production communities, whether single or multi-species.
   

Project lifetime:
 

February 2023 - February 2029

Scientific manager:
 

Matthieu Jules (AgroParisTech)

The consortium:
 

Higher education establishments

Research institutes