Restoring Life: Growth-coupled Designs for Synthetic Metabolisms in Pseudomonas putida.

Summary

Industrial biotechnology has the power to reshape the bioeconomy to deliver a more sustainable future. For this exact reason, the demand for industrial processes using microorganisms is ever-increasing. Nowadays, we can transplant relevant industrial traits into potential microbial hosts, elevating their efficiency for biotechnological purposes. However, this installment can be a time-consuming task, requiring extensive fine-tuning and optimization. To accelerate this task, we can connect these new features to microbial growth. In this context, growth becomes the sole measurable output and will allow us to create novel cell factories with unprecedented speed.

In this thesis, I focused on the expansion of the metabolic repertoire of P. putida with synthetic metabolisms for industrial biocatalysis predominantly through growth-coupled designs. This expansion included the establishment of C1 metabolism, a radical metabolic reconfiguration for high-yield aromatics biosynthesis, and the development of a novel enzyme for anisole production.