Proteomics and genomics of biobutanol production from Clostridium beijerinckii

Abstract

The world consumption of energy is increasing at an exponential rate. Furthermore, the availability of our fuel of choice, fossil fuels, is declining, with estimates that reserves will be gone within fifty years. As such, the search for alternative fuel sources has begun. One promising source of energy is biomass, solar energy stored in the form of sugars by plants. Currently, the focus is on ethanol as a biomass energy source, but it is not without its problems. An emerging alternative to ethanol is butanol, which is chemically more similar to gasoline. Exploiting the Acetone- Butanol-Ethanol Fermentation pathway found in certain species of bacteria can produce butanol. However, this has its own problems in that the butanol is itself toxic to the bacteria. We have identified four potential targets for gene manipulation in order to improve the bacterial resistance to butanol in order to facilitate the production of more butanol. These four genes were G3P, CWBR, PF, and cspA. These targets have been analyzed at both the protein expression level and gene expression level. Of these four genes we tested, G3P showed expression levels as expected, PF did not, and the other two were inconclusive due to statistical outliers.