Protein design and engineering for biotechnological applications

One of today's major environmental problems is the use of non-sustainable precursor chemicals for the production of fuels, plastics and other chemicals. To solve this problem, strategies have been developed to produce certain products in a sustainable way, although not always with an adequate yield. The main objective of this project is to improve the performance of the production of these chemical precursors of natural origin. For this purpose, we will modify very efficient biofactories such as megasynthases. Megasynthases are large multi-enzymatic proteins that produce different natural compounds by catalyzing the successive condensation and modification of precursor units. Within this family are saturated and polyunsaturated fatty acid synthases and polyketide synthases. Specifically for polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA) production these megasynthases have several ACP domains in tandem that make the yield much higher. As they are modular proteins, changing the different modules that make them up could vary the final product of these biofactories, which could be used for the production of sustainable chemical precursors of interest.