Engineering Thermophiles to Produce Drop-in Fuels from Syngas: The Digest’s 2019 Multi-Slide Guide to Syngas Bioprocess

Drop-in fuels from syngas are in. Syngas feedstocks are relatively inexpensive and diverse, thermophiles have several unique advantages, and end products have value as fuel and solvent applications among others. Sounds like win, win, win, right? But the big question that Kiverdi and NREL are working on right now are how to develop recombinant thermophilic microbial strains capable of metabolizing syngas (CO, CO2, H2) into monoterpenes to enable industrial production of fuels and solvents.

Stephen Yannone from Kiverdi/LBNL, John Reed from Kiverdi, and Carrie Eckert from NREL, gave this presentation at the DOE’s BETO 2019 Project Peer Review that covers their outcomes so far in this research including multiple terpene synthase enzymes, the identification of new thermophile chassis strain and verified CO consumption, the demonstration of monoterpene synthesis from syngas in a mesophilic host, and more