Engineering Commons^™

Dynamic Metabolic Modeling Of A Microaerobic Yeast Co-Culture: Predicting And Optimizing Ethanol Production From Glucose/Xylose Mixtures, Timothy J. Hanly, Michael A. Henson

Michael A Henson

Background: A key step in any process that converts lignocellulose to biofuels is the efficient fermentation of both hexose and pentose sugars. The co-culture of respiratory-deficient Saccharomyces cerevisiae and wild-type Scheffersomyces stipitis has been identified as a promising system for microaerobic ethanol production because S. cerevisiae only consumes glucose while S. stipitis efficiently converts xylose to ethanol. Results: To better predict how these two yeasts behave in batch co-culture and to optimize system performance, a dynamic flux balance model describing co-culture metabolism was developed from genome-scale metabolic reconstructions of the individual organisms. First a dynamic model was developed for each …