A research team led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley has engineered bacteria to produce new-to-nature carbon products that could provide a powerful route to sustainable biochemicals.
This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: During experiments at DOE's Joint BioEnergy Institute, researchers observed an engineered strain of the bacteria Streptomyces as it produced cyclopropanes, high-energy molecules that could potentially be used in the sustainable production of novel bioactive compounds and advanced biofuels. Credit: Jing Huang/Berkeley Lab The advance—which was recently announced in the journal Nature—uses bacteria to combine natural enzymatic reactions with a new-to-nature reaction called the "carbene transfer reaction." This work could also one day help reduce industrial emissions because it offers sustainable alternatives to chemical manufacturing processes that typically rely on fossil fuels. "What we showed in this paper is that we can synthesize everything in this reaction—from natural enzymes to carbenes—inside the bacterial cell. All you need to add is sugar and the cells do the rest," said Jay Keasling, a principal investigator of the study and CEO of the Department of Energy's Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI). Carbenes are highly reactive carbon-based chemicals that can be used in many different types of reactions. For decades, scientists…