I want to design an artificial metabolic pathway in bacteria or just using responsible enzymes to produce certain products such as H2 or other biofuels. Where can I start with? Do you have some thoughts about this?
could work by stopping methanogens to exist in the pathway so H2 could be produced instead getting methane.
On of our students made this on E.Coli by inserting genes and blocking some pathways.I'll check if I can find the thesis.
Thank you very much, Dr. Zhang. I read some of those amazing papers before. As you pointed out that the "Thauer limit" is the inherent barrier for bacteria to produce H2 commercially acceptable. So that is why a lot of enzyme-based synthetic pathways have been designed and many of them do significantly improve the yield and efficiency.
For photosynthetic bacteria such as cyanobacteria, I am thinking the Thauer limit might be a less problem because the bacteria can get the external energy source, sunlight. But the problem for cyanobacteria is the low yield and low efficiency to produce H2. Maybe we can design a synthetic pathway from that photosynthetic system to improve the yield and efficiency.
You have a very genuine query. Well, to start with you select the substrates that you want to investigate and then use the database of metabolic pathways like KEGG and see how you can proceed. It is a very good database where you can virtually plot the pathway as you will be told about different steps with the types of enzymes involved. Try it, Success is guaranteed.
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