Engineering Commons^™

Increase In Ethanol Yield Via Elimination Of Lactate Production In An Ethanol-Tolerant Mutant Of Clostridium Thermocellum, Ranjita Biswas, Sandeep Prabhu, Lee R. Lynd, Adam M. Guss

Dartmouth Scholarship

Large-scale production of lignocellulosic biofuel is a potential solution to sustainably meet global energy needs. One-step consolidated bioprocessing (CBP) is a potentially advantageous approach for the production of biofuels, but requires an organism capable of hydrolyzing biomass to sugars and fermenting the sugars to ethanol at commercially viable titers and yields. Clostridium thermocellum, a thermophilic anaerobe, can ferment cellulosic biomass to ethanol and organic acids, but low yield, low titer, and ethanol sensitivity remain barriers to industrial production. Here, we deleted the hypoxanthine phosphoribosyltransferase gene in ethanol tolerant strain of C. thermocellum adhE*(EA) in order to allow use …