Engineering of Saccharomyces cerevisiae for renewable production of plastic precursor chemicals from plant biomass

Currently, plastics are almost exclusively produced from feedstocks derived from crude oil refining and natural gas processing. Despite the increasing awareness of the negative environmental and climate-related impacts associated with fossil fuel consumption, the relevance of fossil fuels has held steady as a result of the recent proliferation of plastics industry. The recent growing attempts to replace conventional petroleum-based production processes with renewable direct bioconversion processes, however, have not yet been made successful due to low production efficiency. Here, we studied the development of a bioprocess for the renewable production of monoethylene glycol (MEG), a precursor chemical of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastics, by using yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae as biosynthesis platform. During the process, we found evidence for the existence of an endogenous biosynthetic route for MEG production from D-xylose in S. cerevisiae.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Chemical Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Uranukul, Boonsom.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Gregory Stephanopoulos.

• Chemical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/122531

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/122531