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Synthetic Biochemistry for Green Production of Chemicals and Biofuels
(Seminar/Conference)
Prof. James Bowie
Professor and Vice Chair
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
UCLA
Abstract
Considerable effort is currently directed to engineer microorganisms to produce useful chemicals. The greatest potential environmental benefit of metabolic engineering would be the production of high volume commodity chemicals, such as biofuels. Yet the high yields required for the economic viability of low-value chemicals are particularly hard to achieve in microbes due to the myriad competing biochemical pathways. We are developing an alternative approach, which we call synthetic biochemistry. Synthetic biochemistry throws away the cells and builds biochemical pathways in reaction vessels using complex mixtures of isolated enzymes. As the only pathway in the vessel is the desired transformation, yields can approach 100%. The challenge for synthetic biochemistry is to replace the complex regulatory systems that exist in cells in a simplified form. We are designing and testing various ideas for building highly robust systems that can operate continuously for long periods of time.
Biography
Jim Bowie received his B.A. from Carleton College in 1981 and his Ph.D. from MIT in 1989. He was a Life Sciences Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow (1989-92) and American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow (1992-93). He has been on the faculty at UCLA since 1993. He is active in the Protein Society serving on the executive council (2006-12) and as president (2013-present). He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Molecular Biology (2006-), Biochemistry (2006-), Protein Science (2000-) and Proteins (1997-2005). He also serves on the advisory board of the Swedish Biomembrane Center (2005-10) and was co-chair of the FASEB summer conference on Mol. Biophys. Cell. Membranes (2006&08), co-chair of the Gordon Conference on Proteins (2010&12), co-chair of the Biophysical Society Thematic Meeting on Membrane Protein Folding (2013), founder and co-chair of the Gordon Conference of Membrane Protein Folding (2015), and a member of the NIH BBM study section (2006-10).
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(540) 231-0680