Speaker : Dr. Youngnyun Kim (AMYRIS, Emeryville, CA ,USA)

Conventional strain improvement in industrial microbiology has been primarily limited to small lab scale for low-volume pharmaceutical and specialty chemicals due to high production cost. High production cost is caused by long strain development time and operational expenses. We have implemented and applied automated synthetic biology platform to industrial strain improvement pipeline to maximize the efficiency in strain engineering by removing bottlenecks from ideas to results. The developed technology has been used for industrial production of β-farnesene. Strain improvement pipeline enables us to accommodate various target products. Operational expenses can be reduced by more efficient cellular metabolism. Production cost of β-farnesene was reduced by engineering central metabolic pathways in S. cerevisiae. Strains with synthetic pathways exceeded stoichiometric limitation of the wild-type strain.