23. 4. 2024

OP JAK Photomachines: Technology, tools and modules for metabolic engineering of microalgae

prof. Ing. Roman Sobotka, Ph.D.

(Centre Algatech, Insitute of Microbiology, CAS)

Připojte se online: meet.google.com/qhf-etyu-sna

Cyanobacteria and algae (microalgae) are attractive as microbial cell factories for the production of
valuable biochemicals along with utilizing minimum micronutrients for the growth. However, despite the great effort and big funding invested in this field during the last decades, we are still far from obtaining actual benefits to society and the economy. The key issue is that phototrophic cells are way more complex than heterotrophs and also less efficient; the rates, yields, and titers are still well below those needed for commercial deployment. The slow process of carbon fixation is particularly limiting; it is one magnitude lower than the carbon uptake of widely used heterotrophic bacteria or yeast.

To make photosynthetic cell factories feasible for industry we plant to construct a conceptually
completely novel type of production system called Syn2Cell, which will be based on the model
cyanobacterium Synechocystis PCC 6803. Using synthetic biology and laboratory evolution, the original microbial cell will be reprogrammed in a way that allows the growth phase to be separated from the production phase and the re-utilization of C/N stored in large antenna complexes (phycobilisomes).

CV of the speaker HERE.