FURI | Spring 2019

Engineering of High Yield Production of L-Serine in Cyanobacteria

Cyanobacteria have the potential to efficiently produce L-serine, an industrially important amino acid, directly from CO₂ and sunlight, which is a more sustainable and cheaper source of energy as compared to current methods. The research aims to engineer a strain of cyanobacteria that increases L-serine production by mutating regulatory mechanisms that natively inhibit its production, overexpressing the needed bio-synthetic genes, and encoding a serine exporter. After the creation of the strain, L-serine levels will be tracked using liquid chromatography. The work can be extended by deletion of genes that are involved in the amino acid’s degradation.