Abstract

Our project Synthetic Biofactory is composed of Lignocellulose Degradator and Microbial Fuel Cell(MFC).
The fossil fuels on earth are so limited today and will disappear in less than 50 years. In order to mitigate energy crisis, the HUST-China team has designed two systems to produce power sources.

Lignocellulose Degradator

We constructed several strains of Pichia pastoris that pretreat lignocellulose, an important biomass resource, degrade cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin, the three polymers of lignocellulose, and finally generate ethanol. We introduced several genes and used external secretion and cell surface co-display techniques to express the corresponding enzymes.

Microbial Fuel Cell

Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC) can generate electricity using glucose, acetate or lactate, especially when the substrate is simple organic. Our project would firstly construct a signal regulated network to control the formation or depolymerization of biofilm. And then we will build a metabolic pathway to decomposition pyruvate into CO2, so that the NADH can be consumed and regenerated for electric energy export.