[2PL] Plenary Lecture - Part 2

9:00 AM - 9:50 AM JST(12:00 AM - 12:50 AM UTC)

[2PL-01] Picking the right starting point: considering strain diversity in metabolic engineering applications

○Hal S. Alper¹ (1. The University of Texas at Austin (USA))

Keywords:

metabolic engineering,strain diversity,synthetic biology,bioproduction

Many factors can influence the success of metabolic engineering endeavors. Among these, the selection of strain background is an often-overlooked aspect in metabolic engineering efforts. However, the organism of choice as well as specific strain variations across this host can have a significant impact on the realized capacity and success of metabolic engineering applications. This talk covers an exploration into the importance of strain selection and metabolic rewiring potential for both endogenous and heterologous products. Two main examples will be presented that showcase the importance of exploring both across and within clades of yeast. Specifically, this study reveals that strain selection can lead to orders of magnitude differences in titers and that there is no singular best strain for all products and conditions. Moreover, these differences are further pronounced at larger scales of production. The combination of genomics and machine learning can be used to help understand the differences in production. However, a significant degree of biological uncertainty still exists for modified strains which makes strain selection and phenotype prediction a challenging problem. Together, this study demonstrates the importance of considering strain background at the onset of metabolic engineering endeavors.