E. coli engineered to become methanol addict to make industry feedstocks

Escherichia coli has been engineered to thrive on methanol not sugars. This change is the latest step toward carbon neutral bioproduction and the synthetic strain can produce four precursor compounds used in industry.

Using E. coli to synthesise compounds such as insulin is not new and bioproduction, where the cells convert carbon into other materials is relatively clean compared to methods using petrochemicals. However, fuelling the bacterial factories is still a problem. ‘Most of these industrial biotechnology processes are based on sugars,’ says Steffen Lindner a biochemist at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin who wasn’t involved in the new research. Growing vast amounts of sugar for biorefineries is not that sustainable and diverts resources from other crops. Methanol, however, is an attractive alternative because it is sourced sustainably from agricultural waste or even carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere. Harnessing naturally occurring methylotrophic bacteria for this purpose is tricky as these species are harder to genetically engineer compared with E. coli. E. coli is probably the most studied bacterium on the planet and is already used for bioproduction. But it can’t make use of methanol.