主讲人： Professor Ramon Gonzalez

Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering

时  间：2023年3月31日（星期五），14:30-16:00

地  点：闵行校区生物药学楼树华多功能厅

报告人简介：

Prof. Ramon Gonzalez was the founding director of the Advanced Biomanufacturing Initiative and served as Director of the Energy and Environment Initiative at Rice University，He was also appointed the Professor and Florida World Class Scholar at the University of South Florida. Prof. Gonzalez is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Industrial Microbiology & Biotechnology and has served on the Editorial Boards of Science, Biotechnology Journal, Applied & Environmental Microbiology. He has published over 100 papers, including Nature, Science, Nature Biotechnology. He is the lead inventor in 25 patents/patent applications, the co-founder of Glycos Biotechnologies.

报告摘要：

Since its inception, the field of metabolic engineering has endeavored to engineer microbial cells by manipulating the canonical architecture of metabolism, which often entails concurrent engineering of substrate utilization, central metabolism, and product synthesis pathways. This inevitably creates interdependency with native metabolism leading to problematic crosstalk between product-forming and growth-sustaining functions that compete for the same carbon and energy carriers. We have been addressing these shortcomings by engineering metabolic pathways that are orthogonal to the host metabolism and hence have the potential to operate efficiently, are amenable to different hosts, and can be deployed as both in vitro and in vivo platforms. Our efforts in this area started with the engineering of an iterative pathway for the efficient synthesis of longerchain alcohols and carboxylic acids, which we termed the β-oxidation reversal (rBOX). We further engineered the rBOX to improve its orthogonality and achieve the synthesis of a host of functionalized small molecules at high carbon and energy efficiency. More recently, we demonstrated excellent pathway performance across three different platforms—a cell-free system, E. coli as a heterotrophic model organism, and autotrophic Clostridium autoethanogenum capable of using syngas as the sole carbon and energy source. Building on these initial successes, we have recently created new-to-nature pathways for the synthesis of isoprenoids and polyketides, as well as the bioconversion of one-carbon substrates. In this talk, I will discuss challenges and opportunities in the development of new-to-nature, orthogonal metabolic platforms to efficiently biomanufacture small organic molecules for chemical and pharmaceutical applications. In addition, I will provide an introduction to MojiaBio, a global bio-manufacturing company dedicated to the production of food ingredients and chemical materials using renewable carbon sources and green processes.