Extracting 'Chemical Raw Materials' from Biomass Using Microorganisms

Development of E. coli Strain Producing Primary Amines via Reverse Synthesis Simulation
First Successful Production Using Bio-Based Technology

Biosynthetic pathway constructed for the production of a total of 12 short-chain primary amines

[Asia Economy Reporter Junho Hwang] Domestic researchers have developed a microbial strain that produces primary amines from non-edible biomass such as waste wood. This technology is expected to contribute to securing the ability to extract desired chemical raw materials without using chemical fuels.

The research team led by Distinguished Professor Sang Yup Lee of the Department of Biological and Chemical Engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) announced on the 11th that they developed a microbial strain that converts non-edible biomass into various short-chain primary amines, and their research results were published in the international journal Nature Communications.

Producing Primary Amines Using Microbes

Sangyeop Lee, Distinguished Professor, Department of Bio and Chemical Engineering, KAIST

The research team developed a strain that produces primary amines from biomass through retrobiosynthesis simulation. First, they predicted all possible metabolic pathways through simulation and selected metabolic pathways by choosing precursors. The selected metabolic pathways were experimentally validated, and they developed for the first time an Escherichia coli strain that produces ten different types of short-chain primary amines. In particular, the team selected representative primary amines and demonstrated that they could be produced using glucose, the main raw material of biomass, as the sole carbon source, and confirmed that production could be increased. Until now, the academic community had not developed strains producing primary amines used as chemical raw materials due to the absence of biosynthetic metabolic pathways.

The research team expects that the strategy combining retrobiosynthesis and precursor selection used in this study will also be useful for constructing metabolic pathways that simultaneously produce various chemicals from other groups, not only short-chain primary amines.

Distinguished Professor Sang Yup Lee said, "This study is significant as it is the world's first to suggest the possibility of producing short-chain primary amines, which have so far only been producible based on the petrochemical industry, through renewable bio-based chemical industries," adding, "We plan to increase production volume and productivity through further research."

Producing Chemical Raw Materials Using Microbes

The petrochemical industry produces widely used general-purpose chemicals for our daily lives using fossil resources. However, concerns about the depletion of crude oil reserves and environmental issues such as global warming caused by the oil industry are very serious worldwide. Especially in Korea, petroleum is entirely dependent on imports. Therefore, the urgent establishment of a sustainable biorefinery that can replace crude oil is required.

A biorefinery is a technology that uses non-edible biomass instead of fossil resources as raw materials to produce industrially useful chemicals using microbes. Here, microbes act as cell factories that convert biomass raw materials into desired chemicals. Systems metabolic engineering, which enables effective manipulation of these complex microbial metabolic pathways, is one of the core technologies in biorefineries.

Although the number of cases where chemicals previously synthesized through petrochemical processes are now produced bio-based through microbial systems metabolic engineering is gradually increasing, the production of short-chain primary amines widely used as precursors for pharmaceuticals and pesticides has not yet been reported.

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