[P008] Poster

1:00 PM - 1:50 PM JST(4:00 AM - 4:50 AM UTC)

[P04-460] Systems Metabolic Engineering for the Production of Biospecialty Chemicals

○YOUNGJOON LEE¹ (1. Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology (Korea))

Keywords:

Synthetic biology,Metabolic engineering,Escherichia coli,Fermentation technology,in silico simulations

Microbial biotechnology provides sustainable strategies for producing high-value chemicals by converting renewable biomass into bio-specialty compounds. Among these, polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) containing aromatic monomers have attracted considerable attention. In this study, a metabolically engineered Escherichia coli strain was developed for the fermentative production of polyesters with aromatic side chains, offering renewable alternatives to petroleum-derived plastics. The biosynthetic pathway for poly(D-phenyllactate) was successfully established, and production was further enhanced through metabolic flux redistribution, regulation of intracellular polymer localization, and optimization of fermentation conditions. Despite these advances, the identification of effective targets for pathway optimization remained a critical bottleneck in strain development. To overcome this limitation, we developed a computational framework, iBridge, which identifies metabolites that influence product formation based on the covariance of fluxes in consuming reactions. Application of iBridge facilitated the engineering of E. coli strains with improved production titers of bio-specialty chemicals, including panthenol, putrescine, and 4-hydroxyphenyllactate.