B) Isoprenoid production through metabolic engineering

Recently, bio-mass transformation attracts lots of attention because it may not only provide us with the renewable energy needed for the immediate future, but also the starting material for our chemical and pharmaceutical industry. Engineering host strains capable of diverging their carbon flow (e.g., glucose) to the building block, IPP and DMAPP, production is important for many reasons and current areas of interest in the Liu laboratory are (Fig. 6):

1. Human medicine.  Taxol (an anti-cancer drug) and arteminisin (an anti-malaria drug) production through bioengineering are our top priorities.  Because isoprenoids (> 50,000 members) are one of the largest classes of known natural products, once systems are developed for taxol and arteminisin production, we will expand into other isoprenoids.
2. Biofuel.  U.S.’s Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 requires up to 138 billion liters of renewable liquid fuels by 2020.  We are engineering isoprenoid biosynthetic pathway to convert bio-mass into bio-fuels.
3. Raw material for chemical industry. We are also engineering cells to produce isoprenoids that are starting materials for our chemical and pharmaceutical industry.