Climate change is having real world consequences on our planet. Antarctica loses 134 billion metric tons of ice annually, and historic weather events are the new normal.1 Its commonly known that humans must reduce our dependence on oil to mitigate future impacts of our changing climate. Petroleum energy production is a $385 billion-dollar industry that uses 70% of oil barrels.1 Petrochemicals contrastingly are a $375 billion-dollar industry that uses only 3.5% of oil barrels. This massive economic potential has led to an expanding focus of research into harnessing microbial metabolic pathways as a sustainable source of carbon building blocks. We hypothesize that variants in known genes can impact the flux and overall accumulation of fatty acid products in S. cerevisiae. My research goal has been to address how fatty acids can be harnessed to produce a variety of precursors for the emerging biorenewable chemical industry. Currently, I am independently running a project to discover novel variants within known genes in S. cerevisiae that result in the overaccumulation of fatty acids.
Duration: 12/10/2019
Principal Investigator(s): Dr. Marna Yandeau-Nelson