Ultra-high-throughput Biosensing of microorganisms for efficient biofuel production

用于高效生物燃料生产的微生物超高通量生物传感

• 批准号: 0967750
• 负责人: Manuel Marquez
• 金额: $ 8.41万
• 依托单位: YNano LLC
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2010-05-15 至 2012-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0967750&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Ultra; throughput; Biosensing; microorganisms; efficient

0967750MarquezThis 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.

0967750 Marquezthis项目提议开发一种新型的生物传感 - 量像学方法，以鉴定改进的微生物系统，以改善原料利用率，以从可再生植物材料中生产可发酵糖，并将这些糖转化为先进的生物燃料。世界正面临严重的全球能源危机，要求紧急发展替代能源。创建可再生生物燃料行业是一种有前途的选择，具有减少我们对外国石油的依赖并减轻气候变化威胁的巨大潜力。可持续生物燃料行业需要有效地将植物来源的糖或太阳能直接转化为与商业相关的液态燃料的生物；幸运的是，合成生物学和生物分子工程的进步为微生物量身定制以将简单的糖和阳光转化为工业尺度的燃料的潜力。这些生物分子工程工具要求生成和筛选大量的变体种群，其中包含突变，基因和代谢途径的不同组合。但是，这些方法的成功目前受到当前筛查技术的高成本和低速限制。研究目标是在基于滴的微流体技术方面采用一些最新进展，以开发一个通用平台，以量化极高通知的生物燃料生产的微生物的重要特征。该方法使用Picoliter水滴分散在惰性油中，作为单个生物的生长和测量容器，这可以实现以高灵敏度和动态范围的每小时数百万个细胞的测量。这项研究位于物理和生物科学的前沿，因此在这两个领域都具有智力优点。拟议的研究有可能对103速度的现有技术和成本为107的技术提供改进。在技​​术发展中，这种量表的改进很少，唯一明显的例子是在过去30年中的半导体行业，半导体制造的数百万倍倍增加了微处理器的全新应用。以同样的方式，人们相信这里的进步将产生广泛的影响，并在定性的新道路上进行科学探究。此外，技术的潜力增加可能绕过生物燃料行业中的主要瓶颈之一，该瓶颈在社会，生态和政治上具有深远的影响。