Team:SCUT/Project/System Construction/n-Butanol Prod

Introduction

== N-butanol ==

Soaring energy costs and increased awareness of global warming have motivated production of renewable, bio-mass-derived fuels and chemicals. Since butanol has a longer chain length than ethanol, it has a higher energy density than ethanol and can be blended up to 85% with gasoline; while ethanol can only be blended up to 10% due to limits set by regulation and requirements of engine modification. The high percentage of butanol-blending renders it an attractive biofuel.

N-Butanol can be produced either chemically from petroleum or fermentatively in a variety of Clostridial species. Clostridia are not ideal because of the relative lack of genetic tools to manipulate their metabolism, their slow growth, their intolerance to n-butanol above 1–2% and oxygen, and their production of butyrate, ace-tone, and ethanol as byproducts.

Here we engineered Saccharomyces cerevisiae with an n-butanol biosynthetic pathway. We chose Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a host for n-butanol production because it is a genetically tractable, well-characterized organism, the current industrial strain alcohol (ethanol)producer, and it has been previously manipulated to produce other heterologous metabolites . Recently, S. cerevisiae has been demonstrated to have tolerance to n-butanol.